Results tagged “google”

After watching this video on Gizmodo, that was my reaction - Windows 8 actually looks fun to use.

Now I have no idea how many holes are in Microsoft's new OS and I hate that it goes back into classic, 'non-Metro' mode, but how awesome would it be if Microsoft wupped Google's ass in the tablet market? You know, created an operating system people wanted to use?

Because based on my first impressions of Windows 8, I'd pick it over an Android tablet without thinking twice.

Last month marked 5 years since the iPhone was first introduced.

Research In Motion has had their research in motion for the last 5 years and they've finally responded to the smartphone challenge and the current leaders in this space, Google and Apple:

You've had 5 fucking years and this is your response?

Looks lovely, but I hope they don't count on this saving their company.

Image via The Verge

MG Siegler responds to the rumor Google will introduce their own Android tablet this spring:

The problem here is that Amazon is selling the Kindle Fire at or near break-even (they may even be losing money on each unit sold when you consider marketing, etc). And customers are getting what they pay for -- a tablet of significantly less quality than the iPad.

If Google is going to undercut the $199 price, the hardware is either going to be shit -- or Google is going to have to take a significant loss on each one sold. Maybe they do that and say they'll make it back in search advertising. But there is real money they're going to have to pay to an OEM to get them to agree to that.

Siegler's whole post is spot on, but what about the ecosystem this "highest quality" Android is going to live in? Eric Schmidt's quote seems to be addressing the hardware of the device. Hardware is only half the story.

It's like selling a car to someone who lives in the desert. Sure, they have a great piece of automotive technology with climate control, and power steering and satellite radio, but it's useless without access to roads and gas stations and mechanics.

This is essentially what Android tablets are today — cars in the desert.

Amazon gets this and while their car might be crappy, they at least have roads to drive on and places to go. Books, music and movies, all a few clicks away. Seamless.

Yes Google has their Android Marketplace but from most the articles I've read, it's a place where you can't make much money and the piracies rival what you'd see on a Canal Street here in Manhattan.

So for me, I could give a shit what Google releases, if they release anything, this spring. If I have nowhere to go when I drive off the dealer's lot, it's not even worth buying.

This quote is from In The Plex by Steven Levy (via Sci-Fi Hi-Fi via Daring Fireball)

Google products are machine-driven. They're created by machines. And that is what makes us powerful. That's what makes our products great.

This kind of quote is to be expected from a company run by engineers. The problem isn't that Google's products are made by machines. Everyone's products are made by machines. But it is't why you should be proud of your products. And it's not what makes your products great.

What engineers and companies run by engineers need to get past is thinking the general public cares about the same things they do. Like how (supposedly) open their platform is. Or how precise their algorithms are. Or how fast their processors are.

Engineers are very gifted individuals. I know, because my father is one.

Engineers have the uncanny ability to talk to machines. Write code. Fix car engines. Rewire houses. Help their son install a stereo into their car, explaining which wire is connected to the ignition, which one is connected to the battery and which one is grounded (I believe the black wire is ground). Oh yeah, and check to see if your speakers are in phase.

Where engineers need help is converting their brilliance into something a regular person can use and enjoy.

Designers convert brilliance. They connect dots.

This doesn't make designers better than engineers.

They need each other to create anything meaningful or useful.

The old YouTube

The new YouTube

YouTube launched it's new design for all users on Thursday afternoon. The reviews are in, and the majority of sites commenting on the changes have chosen to focus entirely on the new features, ignoring the new look and feel. I don't know how I feel about this. Design is an important part of my life, yet I understand that it's a peripheral concern for most people. It's a function over form nation we live in, which makes sense, considering good design is something that has to be learned to be appreciated. That doesn't mean it's right.

When I checked out the new design on YouTube, what struck me first was not the increased number of features or Google's attempts at increasing social networking presence and integrating channels. Rather, it was the numerous little ways the design could be tweaked to make it vastly better. A margin here, a font there, another margin over there, a color here. I'm a developer, not a designer, but even I could recognize the litany of freshman design mistakes the folks over at YouTube made. I could run through a complete list of the issues I found, but instead I'm going to focus on one area of website design that doesn't get as much consideration as it should, and is also where I feel the new YouTube site is lacking. Specifically, background color.

Before writing this, I did a search on Google for "background color is important." Most of the links on the first page had to do with CSS, that is, real background colors, not the idea that choosing the right color is important. One link had the promising headline, "Importance of Colors in Web Site Design." From 2008, the article focuses on the various moods a color could put the user in, and what color choices say about the company that deploys them. It's some real hippie shit. Besides recommending that designers stick to web-safe colors (HA!), one of the highlights reads, "red : Red is the most emotionally vivid color and may cause a [sic] faster breathing. It symbolizes energy, action, confidence and passion."

Changing the wording of the search query doesn't improve things, either. Clearly, background color is something that has gotten short shrift when it comes to design theory.

On YouTube, the change in background color, from white to a very light grey, struck me as bizarre. The old design was never all that good, either, but it was immediately recognizable. YouTube had a look. A cluttered, unwieldy look (worse now), but one a user had burned into their brain. After seeing the new design, I realized that a big part of that was due to the stark white of the background. As important as the little tv screen in the logo, the white of the background had come to be a part of YouTube's brand.

It's odd to think that a background color on a web page could be considered within a brand's color palette, but think about it just a little bit and it begins to make total sense. In print, the majority of the time designers work with, and readers are exposed to, white paper. It becomes something we expect, something we ignore, something we take for granted. On the web, however, a background color can be changed without going through the expense of using a special paper stock or even covering the page with ink. It's as simple as changing a few characters in the style sheet. As such, there's a lot more variety out there on the web when it comes to the surface upon which the content lives.

YouTube's white, then, was just as important to the site's look and feel as is ESPN's red to grey gradient, or facebook's blue header, or Daring Fireball's dark grey, etc. Change any of those, and the sites would feel a little alien. In some cases drastically different, even without rearranging all the pieces on the screen.

From Electronista:

The iPhone 4S sold out in Hong Kong even faster than previously thought, a memo from Ticonderoga Securities' Brian White indicates. The analyst claims that both the city's Apple Store and all authorized resellers sold out within a space of three hours; Apple's local online store states that there is "no supply" of the phone left. Earlier accounts had just the Apple Store selling out by lunchtime.

China isn't just going to be a huge market for Apple, but for every big company.

People who have been saying the mobile battle between Android and iOS is going to be like desktop battle between the Mac and Windows — and that Apple is going to lose again — have it all wrong.

So many variables have changed since then, it's a completely different game.

via designedmemory

Seems I missed Google's new journal, Think Quarterly, when it launched at the beginning of 2011.

From their About page:

When the world is full of noise, you need a little moment of silence - a space to reflect. Google's Think Quarterly is breathing space in a busy world. It's a place to take time out and consider what's happening and why it matters.

The discussion about business ideas that you've always wanted to have, a conversation between equals designed to get everybody thinking, sharing and innovating.

The previous two issues where Data and Innovation. The newest is on People.

The typography and layouts are beautiful and the articles seem sharp.

It's be a year since you launched Windows Phone. Where we at, Microsoft?

Horace Dediu tells us:

Windows Phone is in limbo. The company acknowledged that it has performed below expectations. During the last quarter for which we have data (ending June) I have an estimate that Windows Phone sold only 1.4 million units (Gartner's sell-through analysis suggests 1.7 million). That gives Microsoft a 1.3% share of units sold (Gartner 1.6%), a new low.

John Gruber gives us a nice translation of these numbers:

In other words, for that entire quarter, they sold about as many total Windows Phones in that quarter as Apple sold iPhone 4S preorders last weekend.

My first thought when reading this was how Microsoft has never been in this position before. They've never had to fight for the title of "Most Popular Operating System". This is a company still making most it's profits from Windows and their Office suite of applications. This is software they created decades ago and they've managed to ride the wave into the 21st century.

Back in the 80's and 90's it didn't matter if their software was shitty or great, they had a monopoly on it and because of this, had the muscle to squeeze out any scrappy, innovative underdogs.

Now Microsoft has to prove it's worth. Apple's iOS and Google's Android continue to gain momentum in the marketplace. People are voting with their wallets and so far, not many are voting for Windows Phone. On the other side of the OS, developers aren't voting for it either, unless of course Microsoft offers to pay them to develop.

Microsoft has never had to sell their products to people.

Remember, Windows was designed for businesses, not people.

For the first time in their history, they have to step into the ring and fight.

via @tim_nolan

This post by Nick Farina (via Daring Fireball) was a huge eye-opener for me on Android. He breaks down all the differences between Android and iOS, from dev environment to debugging to UI design tools, but the section on Animation was what slapped me in the face.

How Android deals with interactions (emphasis added):

If you pressed the Down key, you would expect the "Homepage" entry to be selected instead of "Go to." So you press the Down key. This causes an "invalidate," meaning, "please repaint the screen." So the screen is cleared, then:

• The OS redraws the status bar at the top
• The WebView redraws the Google.com website
• The Menu draws its translucent black background and border
• All the menu text is drawn
• The blue gradient highlight is drawn over "Homepage."

This all happens very quickly, and you only ever see the final result, so it looks like just a few pixels have changed, but in fact the whole screen must be reconsidered and redrawn.

If this sounds familiar, it's because this is the basic method used in GDI, the rendering system introduced with Microsoft Windows 1.0. That sounds damning, but really most GUIs operated this way.

Wow.

Let's see how iOS handles things:

When you're using an iPhone, you're playing a hardware-accelerated 3D game. You know, the kind of 3D where everything is made out of hundreds of little triangles.

When you flick through your list of friends in the Contacts app, you're causing those triangles to move around. And there's a "camera," just like a 3D shooter, but the camera is fixed above the Contacts app's virtual surface and so it appears 2D.

Which is a long way of saying that everything on iOS is drawn using OpenGL. This is why animation on iOS is so hopelessly fast. You may have noticed that -drawRect is not called for each frame of an animation. It's called once, then you draw your lines and circles and text onto an OpenGL surface (which you didn't even realize), then Core Animation moves these surfaces around like pulling on the strings of a marionette. All the final compositing for each frame is done in hardware by the GPU.

So when things just never feel quite as smooth as on iOS, there's a reason. I wonder how much of this is relevant to webOS? Based on the chugginess of the UI in my few weeks of testing the TouchPad, I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

As Nick mentions, Android began pre-iPhone. Horace Dediu of Asymco argues Google created Android as a defensive move to protect their existing revenue streams. They weren't thinking about the future. The opposite was the case for Apple, they created the iPhone (and iOS) to create a new revenue stream. It was yet another chance to define what the future of mobile computing should look like.

Here's a great piece by MG Siegler on Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobilility.

This is my favorite chunk regarding design:

Here's another, more straight-forward scenario for you. What happens when the iPhone 5 launches and everyone wants it? That includes many people currently using Android phones. After a few months of this, Google grows frustrated that none of their OEMs can release a device that matches the build-quality that Apple puts out there. But wait, they now have their own company they can at the very least use to apply to pressure the other OEMs to force them to do better work! Does Google also not play that card? Are you really telling me that they won't try to get Motorola to make the best products possible? Why the hell wouldn't they? This is a business, after all.

Maybe the iPhone 5 doesn't trigger that, but maybe the iPhone 6 does. Or maybe the iPad 3 does. Or maybe a Windows Phone does. At some point down the line, Google is going to run into this scenario. And there's nothing wrong with that. The tight control over both hardware and software is what allows Apple products to be Apple products. And now with webOS, HP appears to be moving in the same direction.

In the same way that Google used to not care about design, but now is starting to, I suspect they'll start to care more about full control over their products -- both hardware and software. They'll see that the overall consumer experience is tied to both -- they're not mutually exclusive. And Motorola gives them the opportunity to fully explore this. Why not use it?

It's taken a over 30 years in the history of the personal computer for companies to catch on what Apple has been doing from Day 1 - designing their own software for their hardware products. For Apple, software and hardware are 2 sides to the same coin, and it's a very valuable coin now.

It's a philosophy first put into words by Alan Kay in 1982:

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

Some PC vendors have taken note on how effective Apple's tight integration of hardware and software can be, but since we're in the post-PC era, this integrated approach to computing isn't happening with the personal computer - it's happening with phones and tablets.

We have Microsoft (software) forming an alliance with Nokia for their Windows Phone 7 OS.

We have HP (hardware) acquiring Palm (software) and continuing to develop webOS for their phones and tablets.

And now we have Google (software) buying Motorola Mobility (hardware) for $12.4 billion. Yes, the patents are crucial but you can't ignore the integration benefits Siegler mentions in the above quote.

There's dozens of analogies to this situation, but since this is Daily Exhaust, I'll give a car example.

Building a computer (read: laptop, smartphone, tablet) without having control over the software is like building a Formula 1 car without any say over how the engine is built. So you run into problems. Maybe the engine doesn't fit right in the chassis. Maybe there's controls and wires and valves you hadn't accounted for. Maybe the engine throws off the weight distribution on your car so everything has to be reengineered. Now think for a second, that in our hypothetical race car world, every other team on the track has the very same engine and the very same (or very different) problems.

Can anyone say fragmentation?

While I'm not sure I'm advocating for every PC vendor to develop their own operating system (or if it's even sustainable) I'm just asking, if you want to make the best computers why wouldn't you want control over hardware and software?

So yes, Google is now in the social networking game with their new Google+. Some people have written about how well-designed it is from a UI perspective. Others have bashed them and dismissed the project.

Here's the deal. Google, as a company must do at some point, has to evolve. If they don't they'll end up like Alta Vista and all the other search engines from the 90's. This doesn't mean they'll succeed or that you have to join their club.

The problem is, they'll really not trying to evolve as much as they're growing like a cancer.

Apple has changed their focus and now makes more profit off of iPads, iPhones and iPods than they do on desktops. They also have no problem killing their darlings in the name of innovation and progress.

Google won't let go of search, search is their equivalent to Microsoft's Windows/Office cash cow.

Robert X. Cringely sees a bleak future for us consumers and the stuff we've owned and stored on our own computers up until now:

And what happens once all our data is in that iCloud, is there any easy way to get it back out? Nope. It's in there forever and we are captive customers -- trapped more completely than Microsoft ever imagined.

Apple and Google will compete like crazy for our data because once they have it we'll be their customers forever.

This transition will take at most two hardware generations and we're talking mobile generations, which means three years, total.

With no mobile market share to speak of and Windows 8 not due until 2013, Microsoft is likely to be too late to the party, with much of Redmond's market cap transplanted eventually to Apple and Google.

From a comment on Phillip Greenspun's review of the Motorola Xoom (via Daring Fireball):

I invented a drinking game a while ago. For any article or other written piece about Android, take a drink if any of the following are in the article:

"Open" (take two hits for this one)

"expected to..."

"soon"

"when ____ arrives..."

"will be able to when..."

"update will enable..."

"in the next few ____..."

I have noticed many people seem to be less fans of Android and more anti-Apple. Microsoft is barely hanging on with its phone OS and they're nowhere to be seen in the tablet game, so PC people have nowhere to go but Android, with all it's inconsistencies and excuses - like why having Flash is great, except Flash doesn't always perform great.

Ars Technica: Google frags fragmentation with Fragments API for older Android versions

In a post on the Android developer blog, Google has announced the availability of a new static library for Android developers that provides a more portable implementation of the Fragments API. This will allow third-party Android application developers to take advantage of Fragments without having to sacrifice backwards compatibility with existing Android handsets.

This brings to mind the difference between preventative and corrective healthcare. The United States has been seeing a diabetes epidemic with more and more people being diagnosed with it each year. The reaction to this is just that - to react with corrective treatment. One way to respond to this problem is reducing the amount of corn-based products on the shelves of our super markets so people don't grow to be so fat, putting them in the high-risk category.

Google's Android platform is becoming fragmented across the various hardware units it's being deployed on and they too are reacting. Perhaps a better approach would be to design a more scalable system less prone to fragmentation. As it stands now, Android phones being built by various hardware manufacturers have different screen resolutions, proportions and hardware button configurations.

Apple solved this problem not only by controlling both the software and hardware, but to limit the number of different hardware configurations. All iPhones and iPod Touches feature the same screen proportions (they were all 320x480 pixels prior to the iPhone, which has double the resolution - 640x980 pixels).

We can't future-proof everything, let alone technology, but a little design thinking can go along way.

GigaOm: Why Google Still Needs to Buy a Groupon Clone

Google is launching -- or at least beta-testing -- a Groupon-style discount program for small businesses known as Google Offers, something that was first reported by Mashable and then confirmed by Google in an email to Search Engine Land. The program appears to be identical to those run by Groupon or one of the dozen smaller group-buying startups, in that it allows merchants to offer a discount that only gets triggered if enough people sign up for the deal. But does Google have what it takes to build up that kind of service on its own? Probably not. Which is why the company should still think about buying a Groupon clone.

Sure, that's all it takes. Whatever market you're in, if you don't have a product to use against the competition, just buy one.

Google: Taking off with ITA

Today, almost half of all airline tickets are sold online. But for many people, finding the right flight at the best price is a frustrating experience; pricing and availability change constantly, and even a simple two city itinerary involves literally thousands of different options. We'd like to make that search much easier, which is why I'm pleased to announce that today we have signed an agreement to acquire ITA, a Boston-based software company specializing in organizing airline data, including flight times, availability and prices.

It's getting scary how hungry Google is for information. It seems there's never an industry they it doesn't make sense to be in for Google. Search, news, email, maps, office applications, blogs, video, web browsers and most recently, their own competitor to Facebook. Check out their product page.

When you get as big as Google is getting, staying true to the don't be evil mantra is impossible.

Prior to reading this book, I had an idea of the intelligence behind Google, but I had no idea of the vision. While one may debate (ethically, morally, etc) the direction(s) Google is heading into with their technologies, you cannot argue their ingenuity.

While this book doesn't delve too deeply, it does give you a solid understanding on how Google started, how they've changed over the years and what their work methodology is. It's not the writing that makes this book so fun to read, it's the story.

One thing I find truly amazing in design and scale is how Google created a new hardware/software synthesis - Googleware. It's not just that Google has servers that process search requests from users - its the fact that they have hundreds of thousands of computers networked all across the world that are inter-connected and run on custom software they developed. When Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed their model for search engine computing, it was one-of-kind, a true innovation.

This is just one of many great pieces in the book, there are many more, and when taken all together, it kinda blows your mind. Blew mine at least.

Whether you need a motivational book for starting your business or you want to know more about the company behind that simple webpage with a logo and search box, its a great buy.

The Google Story on Amazon.com

The Google Story - Official Website