Will OSX Lion be king of the jungle or just another pussycat?

I'm seeing quite a few OSX enthusiasts being somewhat unenthusiastic about the early look at OSX Lion, but I'm not one of them. For one, we've only seen the face of the Lion, who knows what the tail will look like. But that face is critical for the growth of OSX, and I'm a fan boy not about raw power and feature lists, but grace of execution.

The message that the demonstration conveyed, was that if you are one of the millions whose only exposure to Apple is an iOS device then you will also know how to use OSX Lion. This is critical to getting OSX to 10% overall market share and beyond.

Unlike iOS, and despite it's reputation, OSX usability could best be described as "it sucks less than Windows for most tasks". In terms of what we saw in the demonstration, game developers of the popular World of Warcraft would understand that while iOS is a starting area to learn how to use a system we got a glimpse of how Apple will transition users to the mid level and advanced content that is OSX. Lion presents as another usability iteration, and just like developers changing gaming mechanics to retain the interest of users as they move out of the starting area and up levels, it has marginal benefit to existing users who are already on the advanced content and productive in the OS.

So what are the implications for new users in the announcements thus far.


App Store

The app store is a clear winner that says to users that the Mac is going to be as easy to get stuff on as your phone. No more putting in long registration keys and stumbling through dodgy sites, just click to purchase and install in one step. Guaranteed we'll see Microsoft scrambling to get something out well before the expected 2012 release of Windows 8.

Large developers are not the primary target of the app store. They already have good retail distribution channels, infrastructure, and marketing to back them up.

Instead, like it has done for iOS the app store is a boon for smaller developers with a good idea who won't have to wrestle with having their own poor virtual storefronts, release and update infrastructure. Instead developers can focus on marketing and development, and let Apple close the deal with 1 click purchasing, installation, and updates. Having every app phone home for updates is pretty pedestrian compared with a store app that checks just once for all your apps. This is one area where open source repositories used in Debian or Red Hat are well ahead of the game. It pretty much puts the final nail in the shrinkwrapped software box market.

Developers tend to moan about how little money people make from the App store, but developing is no different to any other creative endeavour like music or writing; almost no-one makes significant money except for a few that make truck loads. The key to the store is that it makes a few lucky or good developers a lot wealthier than they would have otherwise been had the store not existed, and increases the overall market.

Launchpad

Watching new users with OSX, most gloss over the applications stack on the dock. It doesn't exactly invite you to open it, and with stacks it lacks the ability to be organised arbitrarily by the user. I'm a big fan of using Command - Enter to type out the name of the app I want to launch, but bringing the iOS interface works as a nice happy medium between the chaos that can be Finder and the rigid organisation of stacks. This is a big plus in getting iOS users past the starting area of the dock, but I'm thanking the Apple gods that they didn't put the icons on the desktop.

I am however very curious about the way the folders will actually work. Do they reflect the actual folders or are they something in the Launchpad app?

Mission Control

I'm a big fan of Expose but never really found a way to use Spaces effectively. Mission Control sounds like something that will give an engineer a woody, but the success or failure of the mission will rest on the implementation of keyboard and other mouse shortcuts. As we saw in the demo, the magic mouse is still a little clumsy for gesture based behaviour, and once you get past zoom and scroll, people don't actually use the gestures enough to be effective. A trackpad is the way to go if you're serious about a gesture Mission Control, but not enough to make people switch from the comfort of a mouse. Having used a trackpad almost exclusively since it's release I've only missed using a mouse when switching into vmware and windows. Since iOS users now get the function of multiple screens and we have the necessary screen real estate, it'll be interesting to see if people use it. 

Full Screen mode & Autosave

Refugees from windows can stop clicking that little green button now. It's never going to be as big as you'd like it to be. Or is it? I'm a little confused about whether they've changed the functionality as some have suggested or just 'blessed' the full screen button as being set in stone at the bottom left of the app for apps beyond Quicktime. Unlike the Windows maximise function the green + button is pretty inconsistent between apps so you end up not using it because it doesn't always behave as you'd predict (if at all), and is only marginally better than the drag re-size function.

I assume that auto-save and resume means opening the the same document or place you were in when you hit the red 'close' button. It pretty much makes the yellow minimise (-) button superfluous in most single document apps. Multi document apps don't currently work too well with minimise anyway. If you minimise to the app then a right click or Expose are the most common but not intuitive ways to see what is minimised, and if you minimise to the document side of the dock then it is too small to see which document you want to restore. Windows 7 does this better, as does the OSX app windowshade, but I think iOS points to a better solution that can translate to OSX.

iOS multi-doc

On iOS the multi-document button works pretty effectively in Safari and I could see a variation of it coming to Lion.  Probably the button would fade the background to black and tile the documents with swipe or arrow buttons to flow through them, and click or enter to select. Pretty simple compared with the current arrangement. With full screen mode, resume, Mission Control, large screens, and a multi-document button would we miss minimise? 

What don't we know

In short we don't know much. Finder, and dealing with networked computers and devices other than OSX are big unknowns, and don't get me started on iTunes. Apple got themselves into that mess, making it the bridge to iOS devices, and I can't wait to see how they houdini their way out of it.

If I was going to make a prediction I would think that Finder and the way applications deal with files are going to be a big focus of Lion. That and bringing gaming up to speed, now that they have Steam on board.

I'm pretty sure the pricing for upgrades is going to be super aggressive again. If I had to pin the tail on the donkey I would say that it will probably be US$29 again. Microsoft tries desperately to protect their cash cow that is Windows like Telstra in Australia did with fixed line broadband, but the game has moved on to the applications, and content. Existing users are going to be justifiably unenthusiastic about the likely nominal gains from Snow Leopard to Lion, and will need the pricing incentive to update. It's not like Vista which people were gagging to get off, or jumping from the cat on an ark that was early OSX to Tiger or Leopard.

King of the jungle? well, we'll have to wait and see.

What's the point of Apple TV?

Because of it's minimalist feature set most* commentators and reviewers are missing the key to the trojan horse that is the new Apple TV. Rather than taking the TV in a new direction, Apple is taking us back to the future with it's most important feature. Airplay.

Catching up on some Mad Men re-runs

To understand why Apple is massively changing the game "again", you have to remember what the humble television was originally for.

Television was for watching broadcast content with family and friends.

Before we could afford to have one in every room people gathered round and watched television together, and still do. The television has ruled the entertainment world since the 1950's and shows no sign of losing much of it's shine in the 21st century despite the rise of the pc and the smartphone.

In latter half of the 20th century, instead of just pushing broadcast stations down to TVs, things started to get complicated. We got the remote, the vcr, the gaming console, cable tv and finally the dvd. But fundamentally, all we got was more content sources to 'push' to the TV and a bunch of complicated remotes to make it all happen from the comfort of the lounge. Reflecting the shared nature of the experience, consoles had multiple controllers, people bought their own dvds to share and play, and places only had one cable connection to fight over what everyone would watch.

Who's got the remote?

The living room started to take a different path when we turned computers into personal content consumption devices, and then put the computer into the living room with the HTPC. Dedicated entertainment devices like vcrs transformed into dedicated digital recorders like the Tivo, and consoles like the PS3 and Xbox started adding media and recording capability. Multiplying controllers got merged into multi-device remotes to rule them all, like Logitech's Harmony.

Living room politics and the increasing complexity of the device came into play. People fight for control of 'space' to record on the hard disk, and the household technology enthusiast, becomes a benevolent or otherwise dictator over the media center, with whole rooms dedicated to complex home theatre setups.

So here we are with the impending launch of Google TV. It's yet another iteration of the computer invasion into the living room with a multiplicity of controllers, all glorified computer accessories, bringing cloud content to your TV. Basically you have a keyboard, a monitor, and if it isn't already built into the screen, a computer (if not in name), plus a fancy remote. Oh and cause we're into smartphones you can have an app to control it as well.

But the TV as computer path that is Google TV is doomed to fail, going the way of every niche media hub before it. The current Google concept falls short, partly because it's not cheap, but mainly because it ignores some fundamental truths.

1. Like they were in the beginning, televisions and things that are connected to them are primarily for viewing content with others and not as a personal interactive device to browse or do email on.
2. Other devices (ipod, tablet, notebook, smartphone, computer) will always be preferred for internet interaction, and are increasingly replacing the TV for personal content consumption.
3. Dedicated hardware button or simulated software remotes suck at controlling complex devices. Having to drill down menus with hardware remotes is as fun as Nokia's symbian OS was for phones.
4. There is simplicity in the 'push' delivery of cable, free to air, dvd's and even console gaming. Multi-function media hubs such as the PS3 are ugly crap when pulling, and dealing with external content. Only owner enthusiasts can genuinely love them.
5. I'm yet to meet an home theatre system enthusiast who is a woman. I'm sure they are out there, but from polls we know the console they buy is the Wii which has the least home theatre capability. That's a pretty big disenfranchised market.

Don't get me wrong, I've lusted after many a dedicated media device and listened excitedly when someone swears by their setup, but the effort expended in organising media and connections could pull small countries out of recessions, and it always falls over on something simple, like playing a slideshow in the order it's owner intended.

I just can't actually bring myself to enjoy any of them.

Sony's Remote. They can't be serious..

Google TV in it's current frankenstein form, rather than spelling the end of cable tv is more likely to go the way of the internet that mated with the LG fridge or Telstra's T-Hub that mated the internet with the fixed line phone (not dead yet but it will be). The Logitech Revue implementation of Google TV looks like a cunning plan to sell more keyboards and webcams, and the purported Sony control device looks like E.T. crossed with a dymo labeller (it definitely needs some life breathed into it!). 

So along comes the new Apple TV, and once you look closer at this little puck, it's not hard to see what the strategy is, we just have to wait until November to see the execution unfold.

The Apple TV is about allowing you to share or display your content with family and friends on the television. It's about your content on your friends television, and theirs on yours. That content is going to come from the iOS (or pc) devices you're most comfortable using for most of the day for personal consumption and interaction; iPhones, iPods, iPads, and iMacs. This is technology for the luddites, technology that will work for women as much as men, a critical requirement given one source had 70% of recent iPhone purchasers in Australia being Women.

Apple TV

With Airplay and Apple TV, the television is devolved back into the basic 'push' device it was at it's conception, and will succeed as long as iOS remains successful. Usage is simple, and not 'controlled' (except perhaps parental locks) by one person in a household. The only difference is that instead of a console game, or dvd, anyone with an iOS device can pump their own tv show, slideshow, or other app content output to the television to share with others. 

The user functionality of the Apple TV itself is almost irrelevant. It just has to be simple enough for even the most hardened luddites to use with the basic remote to call up a movie or tv show and supplement their existing cable box or dvd/blu-ray player. It is the functionality of the iOS devices and apps that push content to it that is important.

The pricing is not so expensive that it won't get thrown in as a shared christmas present in the household that already has a few iOS devices. The kids with their "trainer" iphones (ipod touches) will be dying to show off their latest video of their exploits to Mum on the big screen.

The living room will move from the dictatorship of the HTPC to the democracy of Airplay. The iOS device becomes the remote that people actually know how to use, controlling everything except for on screen controls and the on/off button on TV, though no doubt there'll be apps for that as well.

Quite a few commentators have been arguing for apps on the Apple TV but again that's just turning the television into the computer again. Your own personal apps are on your ipod, iphone or iPad, you just need to get the content or application out. People already do content out with ipods and docks, and syncing apps from your itunes software, Apple just needs a future Apple TV to cache applications from the sending device as well as content via wifi.

There are already games that use one iOS device as the host, so the opportunities for multiplayer games are enormous once you begin to design apps and an ecosystem that turns the iOS device into a copycat wii controller, and host the game on an Apple TV (just don't throw your $1000 iphone across the room!).

Maybe they'll merge the Apple TV into televisions, but my sense is that at US$99 they'll want consumers to upgrade with their phones, to take advantage of improving hardware, and TV's are big ticket purchase items that don't get upgraded frequently.

Of course we haven't seen the final working Airplay/Apple TV duo yet, and maybe they won't get it right first time, but like the iPhone, we'll be back in 12 months, and then the imitators will start coming out, Google and all, bringing some new more 'open' copy of Airplay to market badged as a new iteration of their existing Google TV.

This time it's definitely not a hobby.

[Update: It appears some Windows 7 Phones have similar capability with DLNA capable TVs, which cuts out the middleman. We'll have to see how well it is executed, but it certainly makes the Windows 7 phone platform more interesting.]

* Some commentators are on the money. Here and here

Sony's 2010 readers hit Australia: A reader's review

When the first Sony Reader was released in 2006 I was bullishly predicting that the ebook market would take off and become mainstream in 2 years. Instead it took the Amazon Kindle to shock the market into life, and Sony instead of being one of the first reader manufacturers to enter the Australian market is one of the last.

You would have thought Sony would have learned their lesson with the ipod but they probably took Steve Jobs at his word that "people don't read anymore" (translation: the market is too small),  and so left it to Amazon to design the ipod for books with the Kindle.

In September 2010 Sony are finally selling on Australian soil their new iteration of readers. At our work we already have a Kindle and an iPad, and I have an iphone 4, so I decided to add a PRS-650 Touch edition to our collection and have a look and see whether it'll tempt me to away from printed books and my iphone.

The Purchase

Visiting a Sony store is illustrative in why they are getting creamed in the market by the vertically integrated Apple. Upon seeing Sony launch the Readers with full page ads in the Sunday paper I excitedly trekked down to the Melbourne store only to find the store shut. Repeating the exercise on my way back from a holiday in WA the Perth store was again shut on what was a public holiday. Fair enough you might think, Western Australia is known for it's limited trading hours, but I passed the local Perth Apple store packed to the gills with shoppers. I finally got my gadget fix on a regular week day from some uninterested staff in the Sydney Sony store. Five staff standing around chatting directed me to a display stand and left me to try out the demo unit which proved non-responsive. Fortunately one of the staff members got a prod to actually come back and give me some service, and after thinking I was just going to buy the 6" PRS-650 Touch at AUD$299, I decided to get the baby 5" PRS-350 Pocket edition at AUD$229 as well as the respective deluxe cases at $59. Compared with the benchmark Apple retail experience it was all a pretty pedestrian affair.

Once I got them home and briefly charged I put them in their cases and lined them up against the other elephants in the room for a shot.

The Hardware

As you probably know e-ink has no backlighting, but works great in direct sunlight. When reading in bed with a sleeping partner beside you, or with dim lighting, some previous Reader screens included lighting in the side of the screen. This time round Sony has wisely gone with an external LED built into an optional AUD$59 case powered by AAA battery. With two brightness settings the light automatically switches on when you lift the flexible arm and off when you place it back down. It's an elegant and attractive solution and the case itself does not add too much to the weight of the device or make it awkward to hold. The Touch with case is about 350 grams and the Pocket in case just under 300 grams.

The e-ink screens use the latest generation "Pearl" technology also found in the latest Kindle and have 800 x 600 pixels in both devices, increased contrast, and faster page refresh. The black 'flash' on page turns is still evident but most users get used to that after a short while. The key difference between the Sony screens and the Kindle is that the Sony includes a touch screen. Unlike the previous model which was highly reflective, the new model uses infrared built into the edge of the screen that detects touch. 

The touch screen is what sets the Sony's readers apart from other e-ink readers and I think justifies the premium pricing. Although you can use the buttons on the bottom for some functions, the touch screen is critical to the user interface. Younger users are increasingly going to be using touch devices (iPads, smartphones, and the iPod Touch), and will soon expect a touch interface as standard. Only the most budget of readers will be able to justify excluding it in a year or two.

The touch screen is pretty responsive to most fingers but a stylus is included as an alternative. For swiping operations the finger is fine but on the Pocket reader particularly the stylus may be preferable to the finger for using the on screen keyboard or highlighting operations which we'll cover shortly. To my mind the Pocket virtual keyboard was not dissimilar to using the iphone 4, the difference being that the iphone has a slightly more responsive touch screen but obviously smaller keyboard in portrait mode.

Reading

Pocket "Small" text (default)

Text on the new screens is clear and as easy to read as print on a page, with a magnify button to increase the text size for those that struggle with small fonts. In practical terms the only difference between the 5" Pocket edition and the Touch is the amount of text on the screen. The text size on both is exactly the same when viewing epub files, with the bigger 6" Touch having about 1/4 more text per page. This surprised me slightly as I was expecting the Pocket to be have smaller text since it has the same resolution, but in practice if portability is important then you're not losing much by going with the smaller edition if you can handle the small or medium font size. On the other hand if you prefer large print then the Pocket on "large" or "extra large" probably won't show enough text on screen for your liking. There is after all a limit to what you can fit on a 5" device.  


Speaking of fonts, in the Model T Ford tradition you can have any font you want as long as it's Times New Roman. It does however reportedly support embedded fonts in epub, but typography in epub is pretty immature, so none of the books I loaded used any embedded fonts.  Readers have reported they have been able to change the default font by hack if Times New Roman offends but it's not for the feint of heart.

Pocket "Medium" text

Pocket "Large" text 

PDFs are a different story. I loaded up an Oreilly manual in pdf to get a feel for how well they would cope with a layout meant for print. On the Touch the pdf was nominally readable in it's native mode or in landscape. On the Pocket, well you can read it...sort of. They do have a zoom function but really there's not a lot of point to reading pdfs on the Pocket. At a pinch the Touch is passable when you need to look something up, but really you're much better off on either the iPad or the iPhone 4 with it's razor sharp retina display and double tap zoom function. The iPad of course handles pdfs with aplomb. Increasing the text size on the Readers just extracts the text from the pdf page layout which is not really a viable way to read visually rich layouts. For a laugh I loaded one of our large highly illustrated print ready pdfs which weighed in at over 300MB. It handled the file size without issue. But still, even on the Touch it was literally like reading the "fine print", and only marginally better in landscape.

So lets make this clear. Like other e-ink devices these readers are for reading epub files (or mobi for the Kindle) and complement rather than replace multi-function devices such as the iPad. 

The utility of these readers was highlighted on a holiday with my girl in outback Australia. Sure the iPhone 4 has a fantastic screen but even in flight mode the battery ran flat within a day travelling on a bus in remote Western Australia. Nothing worse than running out of battery 3/4 of the way into your book. With the Sony Reader's life rated at about 2 weeks or 10,000 pages for the Touch and 10,000 turns for the Pocket I would have got through my entire 10 day trip and 4 books without even needing to think about battery life. [Edit: Turning the device off explicitly is still the best way to get maximum battery life between charges. There is some battery drain before it switches off completely after two days of sleep.] With our Apple devices, I felt like a junkie in my fevered search for wall sockets in cabins and backpacker rooms. It's seriously disturbing having a battery dictate my life. One remote camp site was charging $5 to get your charging fix! Backpacking however, is a little poorer with e-books for not having something to pass on to the next eager reader.

Aside from battery life there is the endless debate over backlit colour vs grey-scale e-ink. My own preference for reading over long periods falls on the e-ink side of the ledger. There is of course the added bonus that without backlighting, e-ink devices won't keep you awake unless you're are hardened insomniac. For those that like to read just before sleep this is a big plus. 

Software

To read books you need to get them onto the e-reader using the Reader Library software for Mac or PC or alternative software like Calibre. Unlike the Kindles which have either wireless or 3g connectivity, the Sony Readers are strictly a USB umbilical cord affair. Since the iPhone still hasn't managed to sever it's cord relationship with the computer, I don't see this as being a real disadvantage. After all you do still have to charge the thing at some point, but certainly the Kindle, iPad and iPhone's 3g connection is the future for these devices.

There was a minor issue with the setup on OSX not finishing but after restarting my macbook the app launched ok. I purchased a book through the Australian Borders store and loaded on some of our own internal epubs. The shopping experience is not going to frighten Amazon anytime soon but it wasn't terrible and the Adobe DRM authorisation experience is now a simple affair. I'm a big advocate for DRM free books (I don't buy any computer reference books with DRM anymore), but I am prepared to make the trade off on price, as long as it doesn't get in the way. Only time will tell whether I can hang on to my ebooks for the same length of time as my print library.

Once you've "discovered" and bought your books from the Borders, A&R, or for NZ customers, Whitcoulls store, The Sony Reader Library is a pretty simple affair. I just dragged and dropped the titles onto the device to load them in, but there are also syncing options. Itunes users will feel right at home. I even loaded one of our word 2003 doc manuscripts which it converted automatically to a compatible rtf file. The only catch was that it creates the title from the first line of the word doc, and there is no way to re-name the title once imported into the library. 

With about 1.5 GB of usable space on the Pocket and Touch you can fit a pretty large library on each of the readers since most fiction epubs with no illustrations are less than 1 MB in size. That means about 1,000 books plus, but most users are not going to be troubled by the limitation. I'm ambivalent about the memory card slots that come in the larger Touch edition. I'm more likely to upgrade in a few years or prune my library of to the computer if I run out of space. Bower bird hoarders out there may prefer the memory card slots.

Splitting books into different collections is easy to do on or off the reader, and the reader itself has a default collections for unread titles, unread periodicals, and purchased items. Some users say the devices slow down once the number of titles loaded on goes up. Large collections are better organised on the computer which doesn't suffer from e-ink refresh delay, and you can do this with the Reader Library.

Less useful but included on the device are a picture viewer, memo app, and a free flowing drawing (handwriting) app. In a pinch the drawing app might be good to take quick notes but really a smartphone is better for this "organiser" style of application.

Annotating text

When it comes to annotation tools for readers, the built in reading software comes into it's own. To make a quick note against text you can double tap a word or selection of text. If it is a single word the built in dictionary comes up with a definition. The actual dictionary choice is made when setting up the device and can be changed in the settings. There are a number of English and foreign language translation dictionaries available from Oxford and Collins, but no way to add others which I imagine would be useful for specialist applications.

With highlighted text you can choose to make the highlight permanent. A further tap on the highlighted text allows you to make an annotation against that text using either the virtual keyboard or handwritten text. It's not all instantly intuitive but dipping into the manual I picked it up pretty quickly.

Within the page you can "bookmark" with a swipe but I struggled to get it to consistently work. Practice might make perfect, but using the hardware "option" button seemed easier.

The "option" button provides a number of functions within books. There are plenty of options for navigating including an invaluable history function if you jump around your nonfiction books (I really miss a browser "back" function in e-readers). It's straight forward to bring up a list of your marked up pages and a dedicated notes function brings up a toolbar for highlighting, free form scribbling on your book, and an eraser to remove notes, highlights, and your creative scribbling. 

All virtual keyboard annotations and highlighted text can be exported to a RTF file for opening in Word or other RTF editors. I was hoping I'd be able to do something with my scribbles on the pages as well, but although it marks the page, and I can see it within the Reader Library, you can't export your scrawled on pages. Probably DRM would be an impediment to this anyway.

End Matter

I'm a bit torn now. I started out liking the Touch edition, but after using it I realise that I don't really need the memory card slots or headphone jack, which still doesn't do audible books it seems. On the other hand, while the Pocket edition really can be stuffed into a jacket pocket, an iPhone will suffice for most circumstances when I don't have a bag at hand.

On balance, for making annotations the Touch edition is marginally more efficient with it's larger screen.  If I'm honest its paperback size also strikes a chord in tune with over 30 years of reading paperback books.

For me either device is more pleasurable to read on than the iPad and iphone 4 for all but pdf's and highly illustrated work.

Fonts are still a poor area for e-books in general and Sony's lack of any options other than size is not great, but it's not a deal breaker for me.

With their touch screens, and reasonably intuitive interface, these are the first e-ink devices I genuinely want to own, and although I'd be happy with either, the Touch is the one I'd buy for myself.