In 2001 Steve Jobs took to the stage at Macworld and unveiled Apples digital hub strategy. Your computer would be your data’s home. People keep saying how we are moving to the cloud, “it’s going to be so fluffy and great!”. We are seeing the move start to happen, thanks to faster and more reliable internet but is it the right move? Are all these overcast predictions hiding the next development in the digital hub? Your digital hub is no longer a hub, it’s more of a portable hub or as I have affectionately named it “the pub”. Kids just don’t want or have a desktop anymore. Nearly every young adult you meet today has either a laptop, netbook or an ultrabook.
When Apple envisioned this hub they saw you going home and plugging in your devices, then heading out again. Now we take our hub with us into the living room, the kitchen, meetings, lecture and even sometimes the actual pub. The idea that the cloud is going to be our new home doesn’t work for me. I would rather keep as much as I can locally for speed, ease of access and privacy. What I see happening is the cloud acting as a bridge. We no longer have to come home and plug in to sync all our data. Instead we turn on and connect anywhere anytime. This is what iCloud is doing; unlike most services it is giving us access to our hub from anywhere.
The cloud is not a new hub it is a bridge.
If you look around Flickr you’ll find groups dedicated to light painting and traffic light trails. The manipulation of light is very popular amongst photographers, I guess that is because it offers the photographers even more control over the content of an image.
Living in a rural area you don’t tend to get the opportunity to take many shots of traffic a night, but my recent trip to Hong Kong seemed like an opportune moment to try something new. I was staying with a friend that didn’t live to far from pretty busy roads which looked ideal. We waited till about 10-11 by which time it was as dark as it was going to get in a city full of lights and headed off to a bridge to get a good vantage point.
To do light trails you should be looking at extending your exposure time for as long as possible. The best way to do this is to drop the ISO and close up the aperture to a high f-stop. One factor I hadn’t thought about was the background light; nearly every sign in Hong Kong lights up, all the shop have their lights on and street lighting covers the rest. this meant even with my ISO at 100 and aperture at 22f I couldn’t get an exposure of more than 10 seconds, meaning my light trails were weak, so we called it a night.
A couple days later we thought we would try again, but this time chose a busier road with less background light. The images definitely came out better this time, but needed some serious work in Aperture to get them to a good standard. A couple tweaks to the curves and changes to things like the colour temperature, I managed to achieve something that was half decent.
With this experience in mind I decided it was time to order a neutral density filter for my camera. From past experience I had learnt that buying filters can become expensive, especially when you have more than one lens of different sizes. So I took the decision to order a Cokin P series holder and some filters to use with it; the idea being I will now be able use all my filters on all my lenses. This along with my recent move to a house that conveniently has a bridge that crosses a dual carriageway only 100m down the hill means that I might just be having another crack at making some light trails soon.
People have been singing the praises of “Near Field” tech for the last couple years. I feel like this year could be the year it actually takes off, mostly because of a couple of things. With apparently over 5000 merchants having signed up to use it during the Olympics, 350 vending machines and 3000 contact less payment points in the Olympic park itself and London buses receiving the contact less treatment too, it offers the availably that the technology needs. What is now needed is a consumer device that works with the standard chosen by those establishments.
This is where it gets hard, either mobile phone manufactures have to define a standard then release it through all their phones during their refreshes and eventually years later it will be in common use. Or one company that has everyone already hammering to get the newest device and can spread millions of them in one go does it. The only company that has that kind of control over the market is Apple. No doubt their solution would be elegant, but what they can achieve that no other manufacturer can do is volume. The Olympics is the ideal testing ground for this and I would love to see it happen.
I am actually dying to get my hands on a Windows Phone 7 (WP7) phone to try it out. Especially with the update to Mango and Nokia launching the Lumia range; WP7 looks like a viable OS. I would even go as far as to say if I didn’t have an iPhone I would choose it over Android.
Android is suffering from fragmentation, where each handset maker has a variation of the OS; So when Google update you have to wait for the manufacture to modify it and then hope that your woefully under powered cheap handset will run it. Google are combating this with making the ‘Holo’ theme used in Ice Cream Sandwich mandatory, but they are not going all they way.
It looks like Microsoft has learnt from their previous experience in this market and by watching others namely Palm’s WebOS and Google’s Android go up against the iPhone. People want their phone to stay simple but be smart at the same time. They seem to have found a balance between Google’s open to everyone and Apple’s full control approaches to offer real an alternative. This combined with the eye watering aesthetic that Nokia have been using since the N8 it makes it a real pleasing offer.
The titled interface is a refreshing way of looking at a phone compared to Android and iOS’s very similar UI’s. Microsoft seem to have realised that the key to getting a phone OS to stick is to get apps, something WebOS failed at. I hope this could be another XBOX for Microsoft.
Hopefully this year yields the death of IE. When I say death of IE I mean anyone who is using a version of the browser that is not IE9 or above. Almost all previous versions lack any kind of web standards compliancy. Even Microsoft has ploughed money into ridding the world of their own creation, they baked a cake to celebrate its imminent death.
Now they are forcing people to upgrade to the latest version their computer can use. The only issue there being that some people still use XP! An OS that is nearly 10 years old and can only run IE8. Windows 7 is actually quite a respectable OS to use, and even has some features I would like to see on my Mac. Microsoft needs to get users used to the idea of updating.
I fear Firefox is likely to fall into the same trap Microsoft did with IE; people getting left behind on old outdated versions. This is a real issue with the web moving so fast and new standards being created daily. Only the Webkit browsers seem to be any good at staying up to date. Chrome Automatically updates and Safari updates are pushed by Apple through the OS regularly.
