Category: Reviews
Surface & iPad Collision Course
Ok, I’d been looking around for a Surface I could try out. Even though I have my doubts about Windows 8 and especially RT I also am excited about a lot of the features that these operating system(s) have. But amid the parts that I hate and parts I love, there is the simple fact of the pure and simple comparison of Surface + Windows RT versus iPad + iOS 6. Thanks to Brad Wilson I was able to do a physical comparison between the Surface and the latest iPad. Here’s what I got out of both with a summary to wrap it all up nice and neat.
iPad vs. Surface
The first thing I did was take a good look and check out every physical corner, fold, rounded corner, seal, button (or lack thereof) flick panel and “kick stand”. This first comparison was done between only the tablets themselves, no keyboards were attached.
Screens & Touch
Both devices started fine. Both screens swiped the active panels or app icons back and forth with no problem. These things were smooth and simple. The applications started fast on the iPad, a bit slower on the Surface. Just to make sure I had some apples to apples comparisons, I loaded Google Maps via browser along with iOS 6 Maps (which are still horrible * ) and Bing Maps (which also are still horrible * ). Google Maps via browser of course is slow on tablets, regardless of which tablet. This makes for a frustrating experience with mapping and routing. I look forward to having a decent Google Maps app on either of these platforms again, I’m however not holding my breath, but if they’d just cooperate and stop their nonsensical fighting that would be splendid.
Quality
As for construction both devices are light years ahead of any other tablet out there. Weight however is a little frustrating, as both are pretty heavy devices to hold in one hand for any extended period of time. Many of the Android Tablets are dramatically lighter. The feel however, touch of the screens, the kick stand, and about every single thing is comparable in quality between both devices. To put it simply, Microsoft and Apple have done a spectacular job at hiring the right manufacturing facilities to build their devices and have done a good job in designing the devices.
Strength
Will the Surface hold up as well over time as the iPad? Especially with the kick stand and other parts, the Surface does have a little more risk around these elements. Give a 5 year old a Surface and I’d put hard money on the fact that 5 year old will make that kick stand give way in short order form regular wear and tear. The iPad of course, doesn’t have any of these concerns – it’s a single, well built, strong device. The screens I hear however, favor the Surface, but so far have seen no evidence that one or the other screen is stronger than the other.
Applications
Alright, this is where there is no competition. Surface has almost no applications in comparison to Apple’s iPad. This is of course barely a fair comparison at this time since it has been on market for a few weeks and the iPad for years. The iPad has had the App Store to build off of and millions of developers while the Surface has had almost nobody except Microsoft’s internal developers & immediate partners. Barely anything beyond that exists. This however, makes the few applications the Surface does have almost impressive. However…
The applications that do exist have one big problem. Especially the native application Microsoft itself has built, such as the messaging and email client. They’re buggy. It is state no simpler than, “They are buggy.” I’ve seen it over and over again on Twitter, Facebook and every other social media and critique outlet. Let’s take a few applications for a test drive.
Applications – iOS 6 Maps & Bing Maps
The maps, Bing and iOS 6 Maps are both complete crap. They’re years behind Google Maps. So in this case we’re comparing a limited feature map set against another limited feature map set. Overall as for options, Bing Maps at least has transit. On the driving front, since I don’t do this myself (*see below), the driving instructions and traffic are useless to me. However, I did check out driving directions and traffic – both are moderately competent at getting this information. No more so than Google Maps though. As for finding things in cities or urban areas that have high livability – such as Urban Seattle, Portland, San Francisco or New York – both are horrendous.
Biking, neither of the maps applications have biking directions. I guess the rather large contingent of developers that bike to work everyday in New York City, Portland, San Francisco just don’t matter to Microsoft or Apple. They’ve just left that out. It’s pathetic in my opinion, as Google Maps has extensive and informative biking information and logistics planning. Bing & iOS Maps 6 both I’d rate as unmitigated distaters except for those that live an average suburban auto dependent lifestyle. Everybody else – i.e. a dramatically large part of the tech sector for one, is left out.
Walking – again, both maps are broken. Transit, don’t even get me started on how behind and outdated both of these maps options are. Finding great coffee shops and… oh just forget it. Don’t get either of these devices for the mapping. You want a mapping device get an Android Tablet or an Android Phone. Hands down, no competition.
Applications – Evernote
Evernote has simply become a huge part of my day to day flow. I pay for the unlimited or extreme or whatever version they call it. I don’t want any limites and I find it more than worth the money (they could even raise the price 2x and I’d still pay it). So how does Evernote play out on the Surface vs. iPad. Well two things made this interesting. Over the time I started and am finishing this write up, Evernote completely updated and revamped their user interface and thus the user experience changed. Fortunately for either product, for the better.
But… when I first logged into the Surface and tried to get Evernote going the swiping and determinig what a right click was or double tap was extremely frustrating. The Surface made the iPad Evernote version seem intuitive, simple and usable by comparison. Both allow almost identical functionality, but with the surface the challenge is finding out how to get at that functionality.
So in this category, the iPad is hands down an easier to use Evernote device. Once you get used to it, does that really matter? Probably not. But I’m not sure why someone would want to buy, purposefully a device that has a learning curb.
Summary
Overall, I found the Surface pretty sweet in a number of ways. However, I know for a fact, that those things I found sweet are things an early adopter, nerd, geek, techno type would find sweet. Not the person who just wants to get things done and carry on with life. The person who wants to just view internet content or write an email, go with an iPad. If you want some simple, suburban driving directions to help avoid traffic, either device will do. If you want to just get on with life with a sexy and easy to use device, the iPad is fine.
I could go on about the USB and this and that feature, but Microsoft has horribly missed the mark in that way. These are devices for short term use, not working. If you get a Surface with the intent to work, get ready to get a carpal tunnel operation in a few years. I wouldn’t advise using either device for any significant amount of work. If you want to do work, get a laptop or proper computer. Apple and Microsoft have many to choose from.
In the end, if you have an iPad, stick with it. If you have no tablet and want to get one – go with either an Android tablet or an iPad depending on if you want a controlled garden of elegance (iPad) or want total freedom of devices and interoperability (Android).
With that, cheers and good luck being happy with whatever you get.
* Some context needs to be added to the maps situation. I don’t drive, not because I can’t but simply because I find it a horrendous and wasteful activity for my time. I might sound or come off aloof, but I don’t mean to, but simply – I have zero use for a map application that only provides driving directions or traffic. I haven’t had to deal with these problems in almost a decade now, even back when I did drive. So thus, driving and path finding through traffic are not one of my problems. What I do use maps for however are walking, biking and transit directions. All the better if the transit directions actually provide real time information as Google Maps does in some of the more advanced partner cities like Portland, San Diego, etc. Also I want street level information that is accurate and defines the businesses and other related information. Google Maps does this, but iOS 6 Maps and Bing Maps are outdated and routinely provide inaccurate information compared to Google Maps. Not to say Google Maps couldn’t use improvement here or there, but it is by far years ahead in information and capabilities versus the other two.
Apple iOS / OS-X vs. Windows 8 / RT == OS Goulash & Predictions
Ok, I’ll admit it, I have a soft spot in my heart for Windows 8. At least in the tablet form. I honestly prefer it over the iPad model of little icons displayed in a grid over a background with the bar of app icons at the bottom. Don’t get me wrong, I find the iPad remarkably usable and will have one for many years to come. I have sketching, drawing, movie making, picture taking, code writing, code pushing, deployment, comic books, books and other applications that I’m not about to just give up. But Windows 8 is very compelling.
I really hope it pushes Apple to make some change with their own UI to update it a bit. The icon placement and icon bar at the bottom is fine, but I’d really like to have more information available to me at a glance, which is something that Windows 8 on a tablet (or phone for that matter) enables in an extremely easy way.
In addition to that information, the stark design colors of Windows 8 are definitely better than the “we’re Apple and make futuristic devices that disrupt the markets but simulate every physical traditional thing we can”. Matter of fact I find Apple’s inane obsession with making accurate recreations of wood, notebooks, calendars, file cabinets and all that absurdly stupid. It’s great that some graphic artist can do that, but jeez, I’d like my interface to be as futuristic and disruptive as my device.
Overall, the two operating systems for tablet devices – iOS and Windows 8 (or RT, whatever they’re going to call it) – are pretty amazing in their own right. As of this moment though, I’ve come to the conclusion that I will very likely be getting at least one Windows 8 device. Emphasis though, on device – singular. If Microsoft has finally cracked that nut (their other hardware isn’t bad) than I might just start buying some Microsoft “device(s)” in the future that would obviously be running Windows OS. If they haven’t cracked the device nut, then it might be a short lived experiment.
I’m wondering, if you’re really not an Apple or Windows fan and you’re going to give either device an honest kicking in the coming months, I’d love to hear your input on the device. I’m sure I’ll hear a whole bunch of arbitrary ad hominem nonsense from the fans of either platform over the next few months. There will surely be a lot of FUD and propaganda thrown out of every media outlet either corporation can get their money funneled into too, I’m however keeping a close eye on blogs and real people providing feedback that have used both. That notice this or that difference, all those little things.
Being that we’re so flippin’ close to the release of Microsoft’s new flagship OS, Windows 8 and Apple, no doubt, will come back kicking with something this competitive cycle is starting to get interesting again!
Meanwhile, the wild card of Android is sitting in the sidelines. Will someone actually make a move and kick it into the fray? It seems to be the lethargic thing with zero marketing budget and zero existence. It’s sad even though it is such a massively robust environment and ecosystem compared to Windows RT/8 and much more open and capable than the iOS ecosystem.
With all that said, those thoughts thought, here’s my prediction. Yes, I’m going to be one of those guys and make a silly prediction. I’m not taking bets but this is it, this is the SWAG. Along with this SWAG though, I’m throwing out a hope. Because I honestly don’t want them to overtake Apple because I’d be absolutely sick if the absurd hubris of Microsoft came back. Nothing was worse during the 90s and 00s than Microsoft’s hubris (yeah, Apple’s was easy to ignore, Microsoft’s was just annoying)
My Windows 8 / Windows RT Tablet Prediction
- Prediction: 90 million devices in about 2-3 years.
- My Hope: 45 million devices in 2-3 years, 90 million in 3-4 years.
…and I leave this blog entry with a single question. What is your opinion and what device have you found that peaks your interest the most? Is it Samsung’s devices, Dell’s or simply the Microsoft Surface?
Coder’s Vacation : #RICON2012 Shreds the House!
Here I am on day #3 of my Coder’s Vacation and RICON is happening today. This is a new conference put together by the fine folks at Basho, maker of Riak (which note, is a link to the project on Github because Basho is awesome like that, they roll all open source like). However, it’s a little different and way more honest than most conferences put on by a company. Sure, there’s talk about Basho and Riak and such, but overall the conference is about distributed systems. The byline of the conference, “A Distributed Systems Conference for Developers” is not a lie. It’s hard core about systems, data and getting things built by and for people who have ideas and know about how to put these things together. To summarize RICON in one phrase, it is “BAD ASS!” Hit up the #ricon2012 twitter stream for more on this.
Conference Kick Off:
Don Rippert of Basho (CEO) took the stage and brought up one of those points, that many in the industry take for granted, but it is rarely spoke. He pointed out, and I’m paraphrasing here, that the cloud, cloud computing, nosql and all these other things really amount to one giant shift i computing. That giant shift is a move to a better way combining things together through distributed systems. Simply put focusing on nosql or cloud or whatever word that marketing and the media latches onto is just a distraction. The real focus comes down to distributed systems. Sometimes, the smartest thing to state is the obvious thing, because nobody else is pointing it out. That simple thing brings about a greater realization of what is important versus what is just noise.
That leaves me with the question though, are we as an industry starting to get it? I think that’s a good question.
Joseph Hellerstein, Professor, UC Berkeley
…with a little about him from the RICON site:
Joseph M. Hellerstein is a Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work focuses on data-centric systems and the way they drive computing. He is an ACM Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and the recipient of two ACM-SIGMOD “Test of Time” awards for his research. In 2010, Fortune Magazine included him in their list of 50 smartest people in technology, and MIT’s Technology Review magazine included his Bloom language for cloud computing on their TR10 list of the 10 technologies “most likely to change our world”. A past research lab director for Intel, Hellerstein maintains an active role in the high tech industry, currently serving on the technical advisory boards of a number of computing and Internet companies including EMC, SurveyMonkey, Platfora and Captricity.
I also really enjoyed his talk. He took a correlation between distributed systems, data and the British Empire. Correlating things, especially complex and advanced things to something like the British Empire just adds an entertaining twist to it all. Again, a description from the RICON 2012 Site:
Conventional distributed systems wisdom dictates that perfect consistency is too expensive to guarantee in general, and consistency mechanisms—if you use them at all—should be reserved for infrequent, small-scale, mission-critical tasks. Like most design maxims, these ideas are not so easy to translate into practice; all kinds of unavoidable tactical questions pop up, e.g.:
– Exactly where in my multifaceted system is loose consistency “good enough” to meet application needs?
– How do I know that my “mission-critical” software isn’t tainted by my “best effort” components?
– How do I ensure that my design maxims are maintained as software and developer teams evolve?
Until recently, answers to these questions have been more a matter of folklore than mathematics. (One way to tell the difference: a good answer is enforceable by a compiler.)
In this talk, I will describe the CALM Theorem that links Consistency And Logical Monotonicity, and discuss how it can inform distributed software development. I’ll also give a taste of Bloom, a “disorderly” distributed programming language whose compiler can automatically answer questions like the ones above. Along the way, I’ll try to shed light on side questions like “Should Paxos exist?” and “Causality: What is it good for?”
More updates, and the code for my #PhatData Project are coming up. So subscribe, stay tuned, keep reading it’ll be up soon. Cheers!
The #TypeScript Bomb Went off With a BANG Today!
First thing in the morning today the east coast was talking about Mary Jo Foley’s article about the TypeScript release. Later in the day Matt Baxter-Reynolds (@mbrit) released a bit of write up titled “Microsoft TypeScript: Can the father of C# save us from the tyranny of JavaScript?“. My first reactions went something like this:
- TypeScript sounds interesting. Anders is on it, so that’s a big plus. It’s a “superset” & “syntactic sugar” which is also interesting.
- TypeScript is a lousy name. I wish MS could find people to name things with something entertaining. It just seems disconnected.
After a little bit more review and an explosion on twitter I came to a few other conclusions.
- The whole large applications notion just doesn’t cut it for me. Writing big applications well is about a good team, not about your language taking up the slack of a bad team.
- I get that this makes things easier in Visual Studio and other IDEs to do certain “easy button” and F5 type development for coders that use those tools. There’s big plusses and really big negatives to this.
- If you check out the site http://www.typescriptlang.org/ you’ll see open source with the code available. I’m stoked to see that Microsoft isn’t just playing lip service to this. They’re walking the walk these days, there’s even a pull requests section albeit no requests yet, and it is indeed using Git. Just (git clone https://git01.codeplex.com/typescript)
- A huge cool factor too, are the tons of plugins available already.
- Sublime 2 [download] (which I hear from my buddy Jerry Sievert (@jerrysievert) will work with TextMate)
- Emacs [download]
- Vi [download]
- Visual Studio [download]
- There’s a tutorial, which I plundered through real quick at lunch amid the plethora of pictures I took. Working through this tutorial I found the thing I’m happiest about, more so than the plugins, is that there is indeed an npm package (npm install -g typescript). Remember when installing, you’ll probably need to do a sudo.
- The TypeScript Playground is a cool feature. Kind of like jsbin, except for toying around with TypeScript. However change the following snippet of code:
[sourcecode language=”javascript”]
class Greeter {
greeting: string;
constructor (message: string) {
this.greeting = message;
}
greet() {
return "Hello, " + this.greeting;
}
}
var greeter = new Greeter("world");
var button = document.createElement(‘button’)
button.innerText = "Say Hello"
button.onclick = function() {
alert(greeter.greet())
}
document.body.appendChild(button)
[/sourcecode]
…and change the instantiation of…
[sourcecode language=”javascript”]
var greeter = new Greeter("world", 123);
[/sourcecode]
…or change it to…
[sourcecode language=”javascript”]
var greeter = new Greeter("world", "WTF");
[/sourcecode]
…and then think about it for a second. I thought the point was to do strong typing, but it seems that isn’t strong typing the bits in the parameter list of the object instantiation. Beyond little nuances like that, I’m generally ok with the enhancements they’ve added with TypeScript. Not sure people that know how to write JavaScript really need to have this. It seems there is a strong case that this is created to make it easier for C# (and by proxy Java) coders to grok and write JavaScript code. That’s fine by me too. The sooner people can stop whining about how horrible the language is (which I also will admit I’m totally fine with the language, just learn it, it isn’t hard).
Summary
In the end, I’m fine with TypeScript. I think Anders & team have put this together in a responsible, positive way and inclusive of prospective community feedback and interaction. After so many years of the opposite, I’m still always impressed when things are done in good faith with the community. Do I think they need to work on how they put these efforts together? Yes. Do I think the approach of bombing the community with this new thing with a whole pre-built MS community around it pre-existing? Yes. But I digress, overall all looks good, and nothing truly negative about it (unless one is personally perturbed). So I’d suggest to try it out, it can definitely make things easier in a number of ways. I might even have some examples cropped up over the next few days.
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