Underground Movement

I was in Paris over the weekend and was rather startled when I received a call while I was well underground. I already knew that the Metro has been fitted with 3G repeaters, but it hadn't really sunk in. The sound quality was better than in many British streets.

While no one looked at me in an aggrieved manner, I didn't feel comfortable taking. Nor apparently did the only other person who took a call on the Metro during the weekend. And I never saw anyone originate a call.  What I did see was loads of people staring at their phones, running apps, reading websites and, presumably, text messages.

Is there an intrinsic sense of privacy that stops us having loud, one-sided conversations in crowded public places? I hope so. The young woman relaying her love life to her friend so loudly that everyone in the carriage could hear, back in London, could do with learning that lesson. When they eventually got off the train there was a collective sigh of relief. Perhaps the same applies to mobile calls, or maybe we just haven't got used to the idea yet.

Three things iPhones do better

Prior to iOS 4 I had a strong preference for Android. 4.x has narrowed that to a slight preference, mainly because folders are really neat. But there are three things where iOS is slicker than Android:

• Reconnecting to wifi
• Automatically splitting words when you don't tap the space properly
• Popping up the accented character box

All small things, but they can be the niggliest. 

One area where they are just as niggly as each other is the wilful way they select just the wrong wifi signal. This, of course, only applies if you have more than one available, but that is the position in which I find myself quite often. And both phones always pick the one I don't want. Systematically. I guess they are just proving they are computers under the cute hardware.

Rise of Design

I installed Color today, yet another photo sharing app this time with the twist of being hyperlocal. The idea is (I think) that people at an event, party or a playdate (that's when you invite your kids' friends or friend's kids over to play for Europeans) and you can bang away with photos and they are shared with all the other sad people busy with their phones rather than talking.

Ignoring whether that is interesting or not, the app is gorgeous. Really nicely designed with crisp features and educated aesthetics. It is also fabulously easy to get started with no long painful sign up or banging out to another authorization site.

I'm hoping this signals a wave of raised awareness of design as there are still a lot of horrible-looking apps out there.

iPod Time

One of the abiding myths of the industry is that Apple stuff doesn't go wrong. But of course it does, like any other piece of technology things will occasionally fail. However the assumption of perfection has an undesirable side effect: not much in the way of debugging help or even informative messages.

This was brought into sharp relief when I fixed a problem on an iPod Touch this weekend. It had 40 apps sitting saying Waiting... underneath the icon. Nothing would get them to install or allow them to be deleted. Nothing that I could find on the web seemed to address this problem.

I eventually discovered that the issue was that the clock had reset itself to the epoch - 1st January 1970 for those who don't speak UNIX.  This wasn't very noticeable, of course, because iPod Touches aren't normally something where you check the time regularly.

Correcting the time unblocked pending updates and lo, all the apps installed themselves properly without any further action. So there you are.

Comms bring us closer

Not that long ago it used to be that when someone moved to the other side of the planet they effectively vanished. A Scot who emigrated to Australia was gone forever - post was uncertain at best. Of course modern communications have changed all that, but on Friday I was reminded quite how far we have moved to bring family and friends together.

The occasion was a sad one, a memorial thanks giving service for my friend and colleague Mark Munro who sadly passed away after a long illness. The Minister's welcome told us that the service was being broadcast live on the internet to allow Mark's family and friends, spread across the globe, to join with us in celebrating his memory. A touching and fitting tribute to someone who had given so much to technology companies.

In Memory of Ken Olsen

Ken Olsen passed away on February 6th, 2011 after a long and productive life as an entrepreneur, scientist, philanthropist and educator. Unfairly if he's remembered at all, it's primarily for having said that that there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. He said that in 1977. Even having the thought in 1977 was radical when you think about it.

Without Ken Olsen there would have been no Digital Equipment Corporation, and without Digital, the whole shrinking, connected computer might not have happened, certainly not as quickly as it did.

While Digital's computers might seem laughably enormous to us now, they were actually very small for the time, heralding in a completely new era of computing where users actually got to see and touch the computer they were using. Prior to that you had to submit your supplication to the great machine in its temple via the priests of data processing.

I never had the privilege of meeting Ken when I worked at Digital although those who did had many stories. I'll leave them to tell those tales. I have two favourite memories. The first was Ken's belief in doing the right thing. It's a shame that that ethos was lost in the myriad layers of self-aggrandising middle management.

Finally, my favourite memory of Digital computers was the clock speed control on a relic we had at the University. I think it was a PDP-7 which was already 15 years old or so when I was a student. To help debug your programs you could turn a knob to slow down the clock from the breath-taking top speed of 8khz (yes, kilohertz) so that you could see the registers changing as the instructions were executed. Brilliant.

Having Crystal Balls

I like reading fiction set in the near future, usually the ones which are slightly dystopian where many things are the same but some have changed dramatically. I've even written one myself.

I particularly like John Spencer's three Charley Case books, set in a California towards the end of this century but written in the 1980s. The big change is that an earthquake has turned Nevada into a sea and pushed most of Los Angeles under the ocean. What remains is an island. Charley is a private detective who habitually gets into cases that are too big to handle and the books are full of one liners and written in a clipped style.

There are many things that Spencer predicts that seem reasonable: projectile weapons continue to be used but with increasing sophistication, medical systems allow resuscitation of the recently deceased assuming all the bits are still attached, huge cars running on synthetic gasoline, huge gap between rich and poor, and people living much longer.

But the reason I'm writing about this is that there are a few things that are already hilariously out of date yet with some features that we don't have. A case in point are phones. Charley is always having to beg access to people's phones. The idea of the ubiquitous telephony that we already have just didn't occur to the author.

Yet Charley's phone has a message capability that allows the other party to push him information that would otherwise require him to write it down. A potential client can push him their address without hassle. This same concept happens in Gibson's Virtual Light where flight information is pushed to the courier's phone after an initial voice call.

Now why don't we have that as part of our comms flow? Because we have segmented businesses, of course, where voice and data don't mix because the business units providing them don't mix. Because audio and RF engineering don't talk to the people making the network stack.

Computers are little bit more advanced than phones, with their name being chomped down to comp which is pretty cool. His domestic comp controls his kitchen. His friend in the police force has what sounds remarkably like a character cell terminal on his desk and habitually has to use mounds of prints outs. They even have trolleys for pushing print outs around the police station. The idea of wireless networking, tablets and on-screen reading didn't make it into this version of the future.

The reason that I'm talking about all this is to highlight how incredibly difficult it is to predict the future with any degree of accuracy. Whether we are looking at analysts projections for market size or novels doesn't matter. Many people would argue that they are both fiction anyway.

While we can generally predict what technology can do, you need to have balls of crystal to be able to predict behaviour and applications. We also have a curious tendency to overestimate the immediate effect of technology while underestimating the long-term effect. We've all seen the shape of the adoption curve, and I think it is wrong. There's a long nose and either a small drop to nothing or a huge take off when it moves into mainstream. But that's the subject for another blog post.

The only Charley Case story still in print is Quake City published by Jim Driver's wonderfully-named The Do Not Press. The cover of the first book bears no relation at all to the content. The female police officer on the front of the second book, remarkably, actually represents one of the characters although at no point is she in uniform and toting a gun.