Philipp Moehring

Category: Apple

  • Attention to detail

    Schiller meets John Gruber for a 1 on 1 about Mountain Lion, the new Apple operating system.

    Schiller has no notes. He is every bit as articulate, precise, and rehearsed as he is for major on-stage events. He knows the slide deck stone cold. It strikes me that I have spoken in front of a thousand people but I’ve never been as well-prepared for a presentation as Schiller is for this one-on-one meeting. Note to self: I should be that rehearsed.

    via Daring Fireball: Mountain Lion.

    This is what makes Schiller such a great executive. Also, this is what will make you a great C-whatever – being prepared and fully attentive in any meeting you take.

    I still have to improve, but I feel I am getting better at this.

    Edit: Hello Mr. Murphy. I fixed Mr Schiller’s title. Thanks Marcel. 

  • Why Android is stuck

    Funny how “legacy design” is an issue for a 5 year old platform. Things just move that quickly these days.

    Miner told me the grand vision for Android: it would be a solid foundation for mobile phones, based on Linux, that would work with many types of hardware, and it would be fully customizable. It would provide a “basic user interface,” he said, that “could be changed by the carriers and manufacturers to fit their goals.” The hardest part of building advanced mobile phones, he reasoned, was writing the lower-level software that the operating system uses to communicate with the hardware, including the radio baseband and audio/video controllers, so Android’s goal was to solve those tough engineering problems really well. The carriers and the manufacturers would then be freed up to focus on differentiating the experience at a higher level, at the user interface and experience level.

    via Nothing in Android makes sense except in the light of its original vision by Dustin Curtis.

    In my eyes, the clarity of the original vision is amazing, and makes a lot of sense. In hindsight you might say “of course these idiots people (the phone companies) don’t know what they are doing” – but back then, the phone companies were the ones who made all the phones and software.

    The resulting Android platform and the corresponding platform fragmentation are not really fixable by now. Actually, if you look at Amazon and their Kindle Fire branch of Android, it’s not very revolutionary at all – they are working along the original idea of Android. Curious to see if some phone companies will step up their game in terms of a UI layer (I doubt it) or faster adoption of core Android updates (1% on ICS by now?).

    The latter would be welcome, because i don’t think you can suggest any Android phone to anyone, if it’s not a Nexus device. Sorry, my Googler friends. You can’t.

  • Switchin’ things

    Yeah, how could I not write an article on how I switched to a Mac and the world got a better place. Don’t read it, it’s useless.

    I did not really have to debate getting a MacBook Pro, because they are simply the best made laptops. I was just a bit curious about the choice between a stock 13″ model and a somewhat higher specced 15″ with a high definition, matte screen. I bought the 13″, and I am quite sure it was the right decision if just for size and ability to carry. Still, the 15 inch matte screen is beautiful and way better to work on than the mirror mine carries – i hope there will one day be a 13″ high definition matte (if not Retina) screen available. I hope.

    So, other than that it’s not really something to write home about – i work in webapps mostly, Chrome works nice on OsX (although it’s a bit buggier than on Windows), and Office for Mac is an incredible heap of user interface mishaps. As I said, nothing new.

    One thing I can really recommend to switchers is to give up on any other machine for at least a couple of weeks to really get the hang of it. Otherwise, you will only be annoyed by the unusual keyboard and shortcut layout and some basic things like file handling, settings, and the like.

    So, here are my favorite apps so far and what they replaced:

    Texter –> Text Expander a little program that uses shortcuts to paste much needed snippets of texts. i use it for emails, forms, and cross-application error correction. Both work almost identically.
    Notepad++ –> Notational Velocity the most awesome improvement, NV does exactly what I want – note-taking in pure text form, searchable and syncable through simplenote. And don’t tell me about evernote, way too much bloat.
    Mesh –> Dropbox Mesh (Microsoft) is a bit cooler because it allows you more specific folder syncing, but Dropbox is just plain and simple, which I like. Also, the different way of handling files on Mac OS makes it the difference no problem.
    Filezilla –> Transmit well, ftp. Whatever.
    Win 7 snap –> Better Touch Tool this program that improves customisation for the magic mouse (ouch, RSI!) adds a little gem: the Win7 window snapping and full screen windows. I always thought Mac people had some kind of fetish for overlapping window soups, until I found out that you cant use full screen at all. Well, now you can.

    Things i still use:

    Office i hate it on Mac – moving to Gdocs more and more, especially to replace Excel. Plain and simple, i like. That said, someone told me Office for Mac 2011 would look  a lot like a real grown up office suite. There is a decent formula editor, ribbons, and not as many crashes. Not available yet, though.
    Chrome Better and more advanced on Windows, but hey, it’s a browser.
    VLC best video player for everything.

    Things I am still looking for:

    A jetpack and a time machine. Oh, my Mac has a time machine!

  • Fresh bookmarks from 22.06. until 23.06.

    Daily reads

    I use the Postalicious plugin to sync notable bookmarks. Comments are welcome.

  • What is Apple actually doing with “facetime”?

    So, Apple introduced “facetime” with the new iPhone. A lot of critics came out swinging after the keynote, ridiculing Jobs for adding something to a phone that was never used for several years on basically every other device on the market.

    I felt the same. Video calling? Only on Apple devices? Only via wifi? Thanks, Steve, that’s awesome.

    Today I realized that it’s probably something else. It’s not only about using your phone for video calls, rather, it’s about establishing a new standard for voice/video chats. Just as Apple introduced bonjour in 10.4 to make computers communicate (and using it as a backbone for iChat), it is now trying to establish facetime as the actual chat protocol to allow for a deeper video/audio/chat/collaboration experience. According to a rather short wikipedia article, the facetime protocol is based on a couple of open standards that made me scratch my head:

    Source: Wikipedia

    Audio and video make total sense. SIP as a voice protocol is pretty straightforward as well, but the last two are the most revealing: technology to traverse firewalls and technology to deliver media streams via VOIP. Through this, screen sharing should be in there at some point, probably tightly integrated into OSX. Overall, Apple wants to eclipse Skype, which is one of the most used chat and VOIP apps on Macs. The main point is the usual Apple way of going into new markets: making stuff simple and easy to use (traversing firewalls is pretty important in this case).

    Of course Apple is also keeping everything close to its chest by orchestrating the open source development. This is probably going to look a lot like Chrome/Android, where Google makes the best implementation themselves and adds to the OS project in a major way.

    So, there you go. The cheesy video is just for fun, the big stuff comes later. Let’s see if I am right in a couple of months.

  • Flash scheint ja wirklich zu nerven auf Apple

    “I did a quickie test with the new YouTube HTML5 beta. On a site that embedded a video (so Flash was used), my browser CPU utilization was 22%, and the Adobe Flash plug-in CPU utilization was 55%. (dual core macbook pro, so total CPU% = 200%).

    After the video played, I watched the same video again directly on the YouTube site in HTML5. Adobe Flash plug-in CPU utilization was 4% (what it consumes just sitting on its hiney), and the browser CPU utilization was 17%.

    77% vs 21%. that’s why Apple hates Adobe. There certainly may be personalities involved (with Jobs, there is always something personal), but Adobe Flash is just technically awful (this actually may be the crux of any Jobs’ hatred – he hates inelegance, and Adobe Flash is inelegant).

    I don’t hate Adobe, and it does bother met that I can’t see Flash on the iPhone or iPad, but Adobe has acted very awfully in this area and doesn’t appear to be doing anything to address it. Google and Apple have the muscle to squeeze them out.”

    via I, Cringely » Blog Archive » iPad, Therefore I Am – Cringely on technology.

    Kann das jemand bestätigen? Ich habe gestern gelesen, dass es wohl an der fehlenden Hardware-Beschleunigung liegt.

  • _

    When it launches, the iPad’s initial target audience is iPhone and iPod touch users. Why? Because they are already very comfortable with the way you need to interact with this device. The moment I picked up the iPad today I knew exactly what to do with it. It was second-nature. It was the iPhone, only larger — and that felt good. Meanwhile, I watched some other people who said they didn’t use an iPhone regularly interact with the iPad for the first time and it was not nearly as seamless.

    via The iPad Is Like Holding The Future. But Only Because I Graduated From iPhone School.

    In dieser Richtung sehe ich ein mögliches Problem – die wirklichen early Adopter sind vom iPad nicht wirklich überzeugt, sind aber diejenigen, die das Produkt in die Familien tragen.

    Wahrscheinlich ist das aber alles egal und es klappt trotzdem. Ich will eins.