tech

Playing in Gatekeeper’s sandbox

Playing in Gatekeeper’s sandbox:

Here’s why this concerns me a little: I’ve argued in the past that the kind of “open” we should really care about is open data. It shouldn’t matter whether I’m using Emacs or BBEdit or Byword for text, GIMP or Photoshop or Acorn to edit a PNG file, Alpine or Postbox to access mail on IMAP servers. If all of your meaningful data is open, you seriously reduce the friction inherent in switching applications or even computing platforms.

As neat as iCloud is, I’m concerned that it adds friction that a solution like Dropbox doesn’t. It may make “power user” tasks just within the Apple ecosystem a little more difficult—and it makes moving between ecosystems a lot more difficult. Suppose that I want to keep my Air and my iPad but replace my iPhone with whatever the next Nexus phone is? (Look, you never know.) If everything on the Air and the iPad starts adopting iCloud as the One True Sync Solution, doing this in 2014 might be a lot tougher than it is in 2012.

[Worrisome indeed. But it’s a question of motive, and this game is still being played.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Microsoft: “Metro” out, “Windows 8-style UI” in, amid rumors of a trademark dispute

Microsoft: “Metro” out, “Windows 8-style UI” in, amid rumors of a trademark dispute:

I’m not saying I love Apple’s approach to these kind of disputes. But this is folding like a stack of cards, and then declaring that you actually folded like a stack of something else foldable, just in case “cards” are trademarked.

[I simply loved how he put this.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Black Hat hacker gains access to 4 million hotel rooms with Arduino microcontroller | ExtremeTech

Black Hat hacker gains access to 4 million hotel rooms with Arduino microcontroller | ExtremeTech:

The best bit: By playing this 32-bit code back to the lock… it opens. According to Brocious, it takes just 200 milliseconds to read the sitecode and open the lock. “I plug it in, power it up, and the lock opens,” Brocious says. His current implementation doesn’t work with every lock, and he doesn’t intend to take his work any further, but his slides and research paper make it very clear that Onity locks, rather ironically, lack even the most basic security.

[Simple. Onity never considered that as part of the security. What a mess.]

iTunes U Enrolment and Apple IDs

iTunes U Enrolment and Apple IDs:

Anyway, at first glance it seems that you absolutely need individual Apple IDs to enrol students in a course now. I’ve always been keen on handing over as much IT autonomy to the student as possible, and that’s where I think we should all be aiming, but changing your AppleID structures is a once-a-year thing to do and no small matter. Is there a workaround in the meantime?

It turns out that there is: to create a course that students can subscribe to without entering AppleID credentials, you have to:

Create the course in Course Manager – this creates a private course with an enrolment roster.

Submit the course to the person who controls your institution’s iTunes U Public Site Manager

Have them ‘hide’ the course in PSM.

This creates a course which has a direct URL for subscription (it’s referred to as the ‘Audit URL’ in iTunes U) but which does not require Apple ID credentials to subscribe to.

This isn’t an ideal solution as it requires coordination between all the course authors at an institution and the person running the Public Site Manager. Still, it works for now and the future is ever more clearly heading towards individual Apple IDs for individual students. That’s where I’m recommending all new 1:1s start their thinking but, still, always the two stumbling blocks of no Volume Purchase and COPPA’s lower limit of 13-years-old for an iTunes account. I hope we can get these things ironed out soon.

Source: Fraser Speirs

The 2012 ADE Institute

The 2012 ADE Institute:

Personally, I’m looking to iTunes U. My project for the next three years is to lead a transition to using iTunes U across the whole of our school. Initially, we will adopt it for assignments and content distribution. Next year, as the new National 4/5 exams come in, we will be redesigning our courses on the assumption that this kind of technology is available to us. Further down the road, I hope to use iTunes U to expand the range of courses available to our students and, once that model is proven, make those courses available to schools across Scotland.

The second trend I picked up on was the continuing shift towards total student autonomy in IT. The shift to mobile is eliminating the need for dedicated computer space in schools. The shift to iOS is eliminating the need for dedicated server hardware, home directory infrastructures and backup systems. On iOS pupils can genuinely administer their own devices in a secure and stable fashion, eliminating a broad range of tech support oversight functions.

The final step is to eliminate the network. I had several conversations about the difficulty of scaling school networks beyond the 300-400 device range into the multiple thousands of devices in larger schools. Several people observed to me that mobile networks are designed to scale to those numbers without issue. The shift towards LTE cellular networking – which is typically faster than the broadband in a school – is starting to look like an interesting option for schools that cannot provision or scale their networks to multiple thousands of devices.

Imagine, in 5-7 years having gone from the complexity of laying ethernet in fixed locations in schools, building broadband, deploying servers and switches all over the school to the simplicity handing out an iPad and a SIM card and getting on with the learning.

[Interesting. So far, my experience with using an iPad for “work” is a mixed bag. I can code, I can write, I can communicate. But sometimes I do all that stuff in rapid succession, and need awareness of them all. OK, so maybe a laptop is the correct tool, and that’s fine. But I will continue to explore what the office of the future looks like, and am heartened that such great strides are being made in the field of education, and am looking for ways to incorporate the same type of thinking into our office.]

Source: Fraser Speirs

More on Sparrow and talent acquisitions

More on Sparrow and talent acquisitions:

Don’t blame Sparrow. Blame the terrible market for email clients.

[So why is there such a terrible market for email clients. I admit I’ve come to loath email, because a generation of folks have been taught to abuse and misuse it. Still, you’d think that there’s enough of a market, even with the “meh” if default options. I enjoyed Sparrow for the iPhone because it let me separate work email from everything else in a really easy fashion. Ah well.]

Source: Marco.org

The End of Not Knowing

The End of Not Knowing:

Without even really thinking about it, I slid open my iPhone that was mounted on the dashboard playing music. I fired up the TomTom app, picked my destination. In a couple of seconds, the phone beeped to show that the obstruction was 1.1 miles from my current position and that the delay to my journey would be approximately four minutes.

It’s not that GPS navigation systems with live traffic data are particularly new; it was just the contrast between my experience and the frustrated, anxious driver in the next lane that made me think about this. It felt like I had a sixth sense: data.

[I know that feeling and I agree. Also, the phones have quickly gotten better at this stuff than the gear installed in your car. The auto designers ought to be building iPad holders and such into the dashboard, and connectivity for GPS/Cell antennas etc. There’d be a far greater return for the car owner, and you could still charge a hefty amount for it…]

Source: Fraser Speirs

Rands In Repose: Someone is Coming to Eat You

Rands In Repose: Someone is Coming to Eat You:

The reward for winning is the perception that you’ve won. In your celebration of your awesomeness, you are no longer focused on the finish line, you now lack a clear next goal, and while you sit there comfortably monetizing eyeballs, you’re becoming strategically dull. You’ve forgotten that someone is coming to eat you and if you wait until you can see them coming, you’re too late. Just ask Nokia or RIM.

The Devil in the Details

Apple’s current biggest competitor is itself, and I think Steve Jobs learned this the hard way – from the sidelines. When he returned, one of his first hires was a gentlemen named Tim Cook, and while Tim Cook holds a degree in industrial engineering, he is not an engineer, a designer, or a poet. Tim Cook is an execution machine and he exists at Apple to enable them to pull off one thing – the iPod Mini moment.

By initially focusing on getting Apple out of manufacturing and streamlining the supply chain, yes, he dramatically improved margins and it’s a lot easer to kill a bestseller under the warm blanket of an attractive balance sheet. But Cook’s larger contribution is an operations team that enables them to build and ship new products with increasingly ferocious regularity.

The reason you’ll see new iPhone hardware in the fall and yet another iPad come spring is because Steve Jobs knew that he didn’t just need to out-design his competition, he needed to out-execute them. Apple is an ambidextrous organization that is equally adept at designing products as they are at making sure millions of them are ready the moment you want them.

If you think nothing revolutionary was announced at the recent WWDC event, if you think you’ve heard it all, I ask you to think about what they’re not talking about. I was thinking about the iPod Mini as I watched the announcement of the MacBook Pro. While it is certainly one of the sexiest pieces of metal on the planet, it also represents painfully consistent execution by Apple.

Yes, you’ve heard it all before – Retina display, thinner, faster, and more, but I trust Apple when they say they re-imagined everything in the design. I fully expect there is design work in the MacBook Pro that you’ve never heard of that will give the next iPhone or iPad a competitive edge and I believe the experience they’ve gained executing this design will allow them to not only maintain, but increase momentum.

How long can they keep it up? I don’t know, but I do know that Apple believes the future is invented by the people who don’t give a shit about the past.

[One of the keys here is to have a next goal prepped and ready for after you’ve achieved success. And possibly a different one if you fail.]

Two case studies in feeds

Two case studies in feeds:

We all have to recognize that we don’t do everything. Even the huge companies, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook eventually learn to specialize. But the individual developers, have no choice but to work with each other. It also means you have to work with chaos — throw your feeds out there not knowing who will pick them up. That’s the magic of the web. Trust it, and it’ll work for you.

[It’s actually larger than that. Trust it, and it’ll work for you.]

Source: Scripting News