How Many Computers Do You Use?

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Frank

Another reason why equating the “personal” part of personal computing to a number is problematic is that today many people actually use multiple computers, all of which we want to work together to provide a seamless experience. The Internet and what is called cloud computing is the key enabler to real personal computing.

Knowledge workers have been living in a multiple computer world for many years, using one computer at work and one at home. In the beginning there was only one computer in the home, but as prices came down and arguments amongst family members over sharing the home computer went up, multiple computers began appearing in the home. Today thanks to the decrease in prices it is not uncommon for a person to have a notebook or tablet and desktop computer, along with a smartphone.

We use each of these devices in different ways, a desktop or notebook computer for activities best done with large screens and full keyboards; a tablet for activities best done with large screens (relative to smartphones) done away from a desk; a smartphone for activities one needs to do wherever they may be. Collectively all of these devices and what you do with them constitute the personal computing that you perform. Clearly, personal computing is no longer a one device per person activity.

The glue that makes multiple device personal computing work is applications that use the Internet to make it easy to access your information from any device that has access to the Internet. If you aren’t using these type of applications you may want to check them out to kick up your personal computing a few notches. Two free applications that are at the core of how I use my personal computers are Evernote and Dropbox.

Evernote aspires to help one remember everything, which is emblematic in their app icon that is an elephant’s head. I use Evernote for storing information that I expect to need to retrieve some time down the road. In its simplest form you create a new note in an Evernote app and enter information, but even more powerfully and simply you can snap pictures to send to Evernote, scan documents and send them to Evernote, in some cases, such as with the HTC Flyer tablet or with the Penultimate app on an iPad write handwritten notes and send them to Evernote, or create an audio recording and send that to Evernote.

Two important functions of Evernote make it incredibly useful, first is that you can find an Evernote app for every computer available: iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Windows and Mac, or you can access your information using a web browser. You have several ways to put information into Evernote, perhaps one of the more useful is by sending an email to a designated email address for your Evernote account.

Information retrieval is an important part of Evernote, and it includes a very powerful search feature. The second important function of Evernote is that it automatically performs optical character recognition on the pictures that you send to it. If you snap a picture of a sign that has words and send it to Evernote, you can later retrieve that picture by performing a search on any of the words in the picture. The same recognition feature also works with handwriting, so you could scan a picture or take a picture of handwritten notes, and store them in Evernote for later retrieval. If you work with PDF files, you can store them in Evernote and if you pay for the premium version of the service Evernote will perform character recognition on those files so that you can search for them using any text contained in the documents.

While Evernote is optimized for storing and retrieving information, Dropbox is optimized for storing files. There are several different free cloud storage services and apps available on the Internet, but in my experience Dropbox currently has the lead in integration with other applications, particularly on the iPad. Applications like Documents To Go and GoodReader are capable of directly accessing a Dropbox account to retrieve and store documents. Another nice feature is the Dropbox app for Windows and Mac automatically syncs the files you put in Dropbox to your computer, providing you with a local copy. I use this feature to automatically store all pictures I take on my smartphone to my home desktop computer. Free Dropbox apps exist for every computer available, and you can also access your Dropbox account using a web browser.

Both Evernote and Dropbox store your information on their servers that you access via the Internet. While both companies take steps to secure your information, you should be cautious about storing private information on these services. Evernote provides the ability to encrypt text that you put in a note, so I recommend using that feature for anything you really don’t want another person to see, but unfortunately it doesn’t encrypt pictures and file attachments. One feature I wish Evernote provided was the ability to encrypt entire notebooks.

Dropbox does not have built-in support for encryption beyond using SSL to encrypt files while they are being transferred between your computers and their server. I have been experimenting with a couple of different ways to encrypt files that are then stored in Dropbox and I plan to write more about this in the future. If you are familiar with file encryption tools that encrypt files on your computer, you will probably be more comfortable with first encrypting files and then storing them on Dropbox or any other cloud storage service.

Evernote and Dropbox are just two applications that use the Internet to enable the mashup that I call personal computing. If you don’t have experience with either of these apps, I recommend them to you, but if you have experience with others, I am interested in learning about them because I am always on the hunt for new apps and services that increase my productivity.

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Maybe All Mobile Or Not

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Frank

Recently Dave Winer wrote a blog post titled “It’s not all mobile” in which he questions Silicon Valley insiders who say the future of computing is all about mobile. Dave’s main premise is that the protocols of the Internet, including WiFi, are available on all platforms. Dave writes:

“Think about this. I’m typing this at my desk on a huge screen iMac with a second huge screen right next to it. On the nightstand is an iPad charging up. How do they get to the Internet? The same way — wifi. Not really that much difference. Yet one is supposed to be mobile, and the other isn’t. Is that an important distinction? Not so sure.”

If you approach the future from the perspective of Internet access, Dave is absolutely right, all devices access the Internet using the same network protocols and wireless technologies. From an Internet access point of view, there is little difference between mobile and non-mobile. Dave goes on to make a wonderful analogy using an orchestra and how woodwinds produce similar sounds but are used in different ways.

I agree with Dave that focusing on “mobile” vs. “non-mobile” is the wrong point of view because in the real world there will be no distinction between the two, it’s all computing, or rather, all personal computing.

Here is another point of view: for me, the future is about how devices use the Internet to be more intelligent and therefore provide more personal computing. Mobile is a vital context because we expect to be able to use our personal computers everywhere, but just as important are the “at home” and “at work” contexts. What is more important is the blurring of “what I do” and “how I do it” and “where it is done,” with the how part of the equation becoming easier, more powerful, and more personal.

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Speed Or Coverage?

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Frank

I have recently switched my family’s mobile service provider from T-Mobile to AT&T. It was not a decision I took lightly as I’ve been an “original” customer of T-Mobile since it’s U.S. founding in 2002, and I actually signed up to one of it’s predecessors, OmniPoint back in 1998. Back then OmniPoint was one of a handful of regional wireless providers using the GSM standard that I found attractive because GSM SIMS can be easily swapped from one phone to another, while the phones from other providers were locked and you had to buy new phones directly from them.

In 2000 OmniPoint was acquired by Voicestream, who you might remember more for their TV commercials featuring Jamie Lee Curtis than their service. Deutsche Telekom then acquired Voicestream in 2001 and renamed the company T-Mobile USA in 2002.

OmniPoint, Voicestream and later T-Mobile have never had the number of customers or the coverage of the other U.S. mobile providers. What I have always liked about T-Mobile is their positive relationship with customers and great customer service. For example, T-Mobile is still the only provider that does not have a big issue with tethering mobile phones to other computers. T-Mobile has continually earned recognition for their excellent customer service, and every time I called technical support my problems were handled professionally and efficiently.

T-Mobile was the first mobile provider to embrace the Pocket PC Phone Edition, of which I wrote about in three editions of my book about Microsoft’s mobile operating system. For a while they seemed to have the leg up on their competition by bringing some of the newest phones, most of which were initially developed for the European market that is standardized on GSM, to the US market.

The problem with T-Mobile has always been their lack of coverage, particularly in rural areas. Personally, T-Mobile has never provided good coverage of my home, which is in a Detroit suburb. We’ve had to confine ourselves to specific locations in our house to maintain a reliable connection. I had hoped that over time T-Mobile would improve coverage and it would no longer be an issue, but after a decade that has not happened for my home.

Over the years I have tried what I could personally do to improve coverage, such as buying a cell phone signal amplifier and using WiFi calling. The amplifier never really worked as well as I hoped and while Android’s built-in WiFi calling works I never found the quality to be as good as regular cellular and the whole set up was a tad complicated. I did have a conversation with a T-Mobile representative about getting a microcell, but was denied when they learned I lived in a condo, apparently they were only willing to provide microcells to stand alone houses.

The coverage issue came to a head recently when my wife started working from home and needs to use her cell phone more frequently to talk with family. Consequently I decided to drop T-Mobile for either AT&T or Verizon. I settled on AT&T, despite my misgivings about this company, because I knew it had the best coverage at my house thanks to the fact that my employer provided phone is on AT&T. Verizon is appealing simply because they have the fastest mobile data, but I dislike the lock-in of CDMA, and when I compared prices AT&T is the lower cost provider.

AT&T definitely does not provide the fastest mobile data service in metro Detroit, in my experience that award goes to T-Mobile and Verizon. However fast the service is, it is useless if I cannot make a reliable connection. AT&T’s service is good enough to use with my Galaxy Nexus, and I have my iPad on Verizon so that I can take advantage of that service should I want to. I also have a SIM from Simple Mobile that works on T-Mobile that works with my unlocked GSM phones.

After being on AT&T Wireless for a week I can report that I am happy with the service so far. An additional benefit for making the switch is that my wife got a new phone, she had been using the HTC T-Mobile myTouch that I handed down to her a couple years ago and now she has the LG Nitro HD, which is a significant upgrade from the myTouch. As long as the service keeps working and AT&T doesn’t screw up my bill, I’ll be happy; the first test may come when I get my first bill to see whether the corporate discount available through my employer has been applied.

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Samsung Emphasizes The Smarts Of Its Newest Smartphone

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Frank

Like many, I watched the live stream of Samsung’s Galaxy S III announcement this afternoon (EST). I was amused by the grandiose scale of the presentation from the live orchestra providing the sound track to the sweeping video segments. Nobody is going to confuse a Samsung product announcement with an Apple product announcement.

While the pageantry of the event was impressive, what I am most impressed with is how Samsung is differentiating itself by emphasizing the intelligence in the Galaxy S III. As I have written before, I think intelligence is a key component of the new personal computers now being produced. The Galaxy S III makes use of the sensors and the camera in the phone to provide features that are intended to make their smartphone even more personal, or as Samsung says, “designed for humans, inspired by nature.”

Some of the new features include “Smart Stay,” which utilizes the front facing camera to determine whether you are looking at the phone, and if you do keeps the display on, otherwise it dims the display to save battery life. All other smartphones dim the display after a period of time after the last time a touch was recorded on the screen. I think this is a smart way to use the camera, although I wonder how this will affect battery life.

“S Voice” appears to be Samsung’s answer to Apple’s Siri. I find it interesting that Samsung has chosen to integrate its own natural language processing engine into their phone rather than wait for something from Google. I haven’t seen any information about the breadth of commands that S Voice recognizes, but one difference is that it appears to be continually monitoring the mic for a prompt as you can engage the function by saying “Hi Galaxy.” (Another potential battery drain item.) I believe Samsung may have worked with Vlingo to provide S Voice as the Vlingo app has a similar capability.

The “Direct Call” feature uses the motion and proximity sensor to detect whether you put the phone to your ear while typing a text message and if you do, it will automatically call the person to whom you were writing the message. Apparently Samsung believes people will often change their minds while writing a text message and wish to call the person instead. I am not sure how often I would use this feature.

Smart Stay, S Voice, and Direct Call exist to make the Galaxy S III capable to determining how you wish to use the smartphone without you having to do anything unnatural, and this is the type of intelligence I believe will be refined and incorporated into more devices. In their announcement Samsung went to great lengths to show how these features work, and besides S Voice, these features are not available on the iPhone. It remains to be seen how well they will work in the “real world” and whether they will be actually used rather than serve as “phone envy” demonstrations.

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Chasing Wiggly Icons

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Frank

When I set up the new iPad, I opted to not restore from a backup. The data I store on the original iPad is synchronized with Internet services like Evernote and Google, so I didn’t have any photos or contacts on the original iPad that I wanted to transfer to the new iPad.

What I did want to transfer were the apps on the original iPad, which you can do from iCloud or a Mac. I had read that while restoring from iCloud works, it is also awfully slow, and since I have two Macs at home, there was no problem using one to install my apps on the new iPad. My original iPad syncs with a Mac Mini, but I wanted to use my Macbook Air to set up the new iPad.

The Macbook Air syncs with iCloud and I noticed that all of the apps I had on the original iPad were in fact on the Air, so I figured I ought to be able to install the apps from the Air. Fortunately, I was right, all of the apps did install on the new iPad, however none of the folder structure I have on the original iPad copied over, leaving me to manually recreate a bunch of folders.

Creating and organizing apps in to folders should be easy on the iPad, but it was actually very frustrating. It seems that often times iOS doesn’t understand whether you are trying to put one icon on top of another, to create a folder or put an app in a folder, or putting an icon next to another icon. I would drag an icon towards the app or folder icon only to have it slide away on me. Back and forth I would be sliding icons around as if the new iPad was playing a game of keep away with me. Several times I gave up and screamed in total frustration. (Note: It looks like I could have done the organizing from the Macbook Air, but that didn’t even occur to me at the time.)

Eventually, after expending much patience and much more time than I would prefer, I had all of my apps on the new iPad organized in folders. Now of course, I could have just left the icons spread across the home screens as Apple originally intended, but I personally find that to be very cluttered. Frankly, I much prefer the approach that Google took with Android that puts all app icons in a drawer that hides away, and organizes apps alphabetically.

For all the emphasis that Apple places on apps, it is surprising that it doesn’t provide more tools in iOS for organizing and managing apps. It’s as if Apple really doesn’t expect one to install more than a handful of apps. Dragging and dropping works nice when all you have are a few screens of apps, but I find it a tedious approach to managing dozens of apps. Fortunately, I have everything nicely organized now, until I get the next, new iPad or something dreadful happens to this iPad.

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