Got My Google Wave Invite!

FINALLY! About a month ago, I applied to receive a Google Wave preview account after watching Google's nearly 90 minute spiel of its new, open sourced, online software in development. As per Google,

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Even though I only have a preview account, the software still allows me to fiddle around with most of the basic  perks of using waves instead of emails. The first time I saw Google Wave I thought it was Email 2.0. Wrong. If anything, a wave is absolutely not an email, at least, not necessarily. Like Gmail, it records conversations, one after another. Unlike Gmail, these messages can be edited at any time as well as add text, pictures or video to any part of the message. For example, say you're "waving" about a group project and you're brainstorming how to attack your topics; "wavers" (Google Wave users) can add onto other's messages similar to Facebook's Comment feature instantly. So instead of replying and forwarding an email back and forth to different people, creating different versions of it, Google Wave is one, live host of messages where you can add people to access it. Since it's currently in preview, you only get to forward 8 invites and the functionality is still rocky but it's awesome - updates to come once I play around with it more.

Below is the Google I/O Demo Presentation of Google Wave:

Google Chrome OS = Yum

Google released its Chrome web browser in 2008 for Windows, soon to be ported for Macs. It's been a year and this is just blowing my mind. Why hadn't anyone thought about this before?!

The Google Chrome Operating System seems like the logically next step for Google considering it has taken over the internet platform and has entered the mobile phone industry with Android and the recent Droid. Now, with Google Chrome OS, Google definitely raises the bar of what I reposted from Minimalism here. The video above makes a very good point of creating software that works more like the Internet - an internet operating system.

Below is a demo of Google Chrome OS = 11ish minutes of gold.

8bit "Thriller" Tribute

Ok, I know I mentioned I thought MJ has been overplayed, but this is awesome!

Minimal: Minimalism in Things

Minimal is a blog I recently started following. As it's subtitle suggests, the blog looks for any relation to minimalism in culture and everyday life. In its very first blog post it defines:

Minimalism, the philosophy of a life of less, is more sustainable because it uses less, and thus recycling isn’t as necessary (though it’s still important). It’s not sustainable to continue to consume huge amounts of products (no matter how green they are) or use natural resources (no matter how organic).

Just recently, the minimalist wrote a post retrieving 3 previous ones on operating systems. They're a bit long all compiled up onto here but they're really interesting and he makes really good points as far as the correlation between OSs and the relationship between hardware and software.

The Sad State of Computing Today

The sad state of computing today.

The current state of PC laptops and desktops is depressing. Every time a new hardware vendor comes around it adds yet another interface, plug, connector or simply breaks whatever shitty driver the PC has. Not to mention the clutter.

Then you have the OS’s that run on a PC. They have to support so many different pieces of hardware that no wonder they are bad and unstable. I mean, Linux is great, BSD is great, don’t get me wrong, but because they have to support so much crappy hardware with a zillion combinations that at the end the OS runs scared. Windows is bad. Period.

Then you have Apple computers. While Apple hardware is not perfect, it is good quality hardware; add to that the fact the OS is tightly integrated and tailored to that hardware and that hardware ONLY and you have a very stable platform.

My wife mentioned the other day something that made perfect sense. She said that each brand of computers should make its own OS, like Apple, for its own hardware. So, Dell would make Dell OS, Sony would have Sony OS and Toshiba the Toshiba OS. That way we will have an OS that is tailored to the hardware and will work correctly.

Anyway, all this is very sad. We reached the point where we need to rethink the computer. Maybe it’s time to re-invent the computer. Maybe it’s time to ditch the desktop paradigm and use something different, more in tune with what people expect from the computers today.

In the meantime, stay out of PCs. They are bad for your health. If you still need to use a PC, do yourself a favor and install Linux or BSD.

On Operating Systems 

This is going to a somewhat long rant.

The previous post about Google Android being confused got me thinking about the poor state of mobile cellphones and PC’s today, and after some thinking I realized that the fault here is not the hardware but the operating system.

Let’s start with computers.

Before the PC appeared each computer has its own OS. From Mainframes all the way to what back then was known as a home computer (Texas Instrument TI 994A, Commodore, ZX, etc). Each has its own operating system that was tailored to work with that specific hardware.

Then the PC happen and it both ruined our lives and made it easier at the same time.

In the beginning it was IBM and Apple. Apple wrote its own OS, while IBM has to rely on an external source for the OS. Then the clone war happened. People started building copies of the IBM PC with hardware that was slightly different. Bill Gates saw a good busyness model here and the rest is history.

Today there are so many variants of hardware for the PC that the operating systems that run on the PC have to support a gazillion drivers for all those infinite combinations of hardware, making them (the OS’s) very unstable and unreliable and making the hardware work below its capabilities.

Apple, on the other end, traditionally made it hard to copy its hardware so the Mac is still a Mac and there is only one OS that is “Mac compatible”. Because of this “Everything just works” and it works great.

A while a go my wife, the non-techie in our family and a Mac user, asked me: “How come Dell or Toshiba or Sony don’t make their own OS’s? I mean, if each brand had its own OS it would be better because the people that built the computers know the computers better than Microsoft.”

That simple comment stroke me as genius in its simplicity and in its truth.

Yes, there would be some problems with binary formats and other things like data exchange, but if there is a standard that sets binary formats and all the other formats are open standards, or, better, some form of plain text format then it would be easy to share data between different OS’s and each computer would run then best they can. The PC wouldn’t suck anymore.

All this brings me to the cellphone world.

In the beginning the cellphone companies wrote their own OS’s. Nokia OS was great. Easy, intuitive and fast. The same with Ericsson. Motorola always sucked, but that’s beside the point.

Then something happened. OS’s started appearing for the cellphones that were not designed or implemented by the cellphone manufacturer: Symbian OS, Google android and Windows mobile to name a few.

In the United States it even got worse. Each carrier implemented its own OS. Verizon installed a hideous, horrendous and not user friendly OS on ALL its non smart-phones models. I am a huge fun of Nokia but then I saw the Nokias on Verizon and I wanted to vomit. The same with AT&T, Sprint and other carriers. Why? WHY? Do you know better than the cellphone manufacturer? NO!

Before I got my iPhone I had Verizon, simply because it was the easiest to get. When I went to pick the phone I saw that they all had the same OS. When I asked the manager of the store to give me a phone that has the original OS, not the nasty version they install, he didn’t know what an OS was.

So now we are starting to see the same pattern on both cellphones and PC’s. The OS’s being installed are not “native” and on the long run cellphones will become unstable, insecure, bloated and will work below their hardware capabilities.

It already started. It is happening.

I’ll stick with a Mac for a computer and either an iPhone or go to Europe, get a Nokia with its own OS and open the cellphone here. It’ll make my life better.

The OS Opportunity 

John Gruber makes the same point I made a few weeks ago here and a few months ago here. PC makers need to create their own OS.

"It’s not just that Apple is different among computer makers. It’s that Apple is the only one that even can be different, because it’s the only one that has its own OS. Part of the industry-wide herd mentality is an assumption that no one else can make a computer OS — that anyone can make a computer but only Microsoft can make an OS. It should be embarrassing to companies like Dell and Sony, with deep pockets and strong brand names, that they’re stuck selling computers with the same copy of Windows installed as the no-name brands.

Supposedly, tomorrow Google is set to unveil the details of Chrome OS, but we already know one thing about it: it’s designed around the assumption that the Web is the most important software platform in the world today.

But last week came news of another, similar initiative, from a far smaller company than Google: the Litl — a $700 “webbook”. If you haven’t seen it, go check out their web site — the videos on their support page offer the best introduction to their UI. It’s fascinating and clever in several ways. It is refreshingly simple. And most importantly: it is truly new. I don’t know if Litl is going to be a success — $700 seems steep for this when you can get a MacBook for $999, and the easel mode strikes me as an awkward gimmick without a touchscreen — but everyone involved with the Litl deserves tremendous credit just for having the stones to do this, to say, Hey, maybe computers in 2010 can do better than a user experience that is fundamentally unchanged from the original Macintosh in 1984.

If a small startup can build the Litl, why couldn’t a big company like Dell or Sony? People today still love HP calculators made 30 or even 40 years ago. Has HP made anything this decade that anyone will remember fondly even five years from now? Inkjet printers?

If Palm can create WebOS for pocket-sized computers — replete with an email client, calendaring app, web browser, and SDK — why couldn’t these companies make something equivalent for full-size computers? The hard part of what Palm is doing with WebOS is getting acceptable performance out of a cell phone processor.

These PC makers are lacking in neither financial resources nor opportunity. What they’re lacking is ambition, gumption, and passion for great software and new frontiers. They’re busy dying."

If you've never heard about this blog it's amazing! Check it out, here.

"Sparkly Vampires Beat The Joker"

This weekend was the grand ole' opening of Twilight Saga: The New Moon. Here's a few things that happened according to the people over at Film School Rejects:

1. The Friday haul of $72 million is the biggest Friday gross of all time, EVER. It tops the $67.2 million record of The Dark Knight from last year.

2. The midnight sales, again, were the highest of all time. $26.27 million at 3,514 locations, beating the record previously held by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which made $22.2 million at 3,003 earlier this year.

3. The $140 million weekend is the highest domestic opening of all time for a non-summer release.

4. Let’s not forget the pre-sale records set by MovieTickets.com and Fandango.com for advance sales.

5. It is also the highest opening weekend haul of 2009 and the top opening haul for the first three days of a release (beating Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’s $127,851,614 for its Wednesday-Thursday-Friday rollout).

Upon reading it out loud, one of my roommates couldn't believe that "sparkly vampires beat the joker" in an indifferent form of disapproval (and disgust). I responded that you know a.) it's a large franchise, b.) it has amazing marketing outlets (morning news shows, all sorts of conventions, etc.) and c.) it really is a hit or miss.

After thinking more about it, I just thought about the demographics. The Twilight franchise is similar to Harry Potter in demos for example; they attract the young tweens and the teens mostly, and the usual handfuls of adults. However, Twilight brings in older crowds, those 18-34s. I'm definitely more of an HP fan at heart, but I enjoyed the Twilight books (as mormon as they are; i.e. Bella is a twat of a character in most if not all literature, more so than Tess of the D'Urbervilles) and I like the movies.

I can admit that Twilight is a lot hotter and sexier than HP, including a pretty attractive cast. This is of course all subtle enough to keep the movies PG-13. And let's consider the fact that it's a romance, too. People are attracted to that, well at least grown women, teenybopper college students and crying t(w)eens, and they are a large part of the world's population. PERIOD. Let's not forget those wonderful gay men who pine over Rob and Taylor and every other shirtless boy in the series. Clearly, you can kind of see how the Twilight franchise has a broader scope in terms of demographics: girls, women and men.

But let's bring it back to the The Dark Knight: action flick, PG-13, skews guys, amazing cast, amazing franchise, amazing marketing, summer release. Yes people will flock to see it! But let's face it. This business is all about the hit-or-miss, that most industry-goers tend to forget. Both movies had a great opening weekend, so in the eyes of a distributor/producer, they're both hits. Some will think, "oh, NM made more money opening weekend than TDK, that means NM is better." What?! NO. There are so many theories and supposed formulas on how to really make a bangin' profit off of a movie, especially a franchise, but a lot of it is timing, let alone all the market research companies do to figure out how to promote their films.

There is no way in hell I can prove how and why New Moon made more money in its opening weekend than The Dark Knight and tons of other awesome movies. Lance Krall totally tells it how it is in an Arts Review interview, "no one out here knows what the hell they’re doing." True story; write it down. It pretty much applies to most professions.

PS - I'm on Team Jacob.

Angora Napkin

I grew up on Ren & Stimpy, Rocco's Modern Life, Ahhh! Real Monsters and a bunch of other Nickelodeon 80s-90s classics. In the 2000s however, I feel like Nick has definitely lost that animated edge it once had. You know, the crude kind of raw subtle-yet-in-your-face humor. Sponge Bob does retain some of that scatological quality to it. It's definitely made for young demos, but works nicely across older age groups.

Now here is Angora Napkin! It's only the opening credits but it's sure to make you want to watch the series. It pretty much brings the arbitrariness of the likes of South Park and Family Guy, and mixes it up with a girly-grotesque-Ren&Stimpy-feel. Right now, its running in Canada's Teletoon- Detour Pilot Project, where different shows get voted on and the winner gets greenlit. So far Angora isn't doing so well compared to the other shows but hopefully some miracle will happen and Angora will go on the air SOMEWHERE! Watch the pilot episode from the Teletoon DETOUR website here. (PS - Dolphinboy is a total sketchball, but he'd probably be my friend.)

Sound Of Music...Not Surrounded by Alps

After Michael Jackson's death, there was this huge boom in impromptu dancing in train stations and such, but from all of the MJ over play, they stopped fascinating me. This Do Re Mi dance is amazing, 1) I love the Sound of Music and Julie Andrew's voice is majestically regal, and 2) the fact that there are little kids doing this whole dance is awesome.

I guess I do have to point out how "impromptu" anything nowadays has become popular. It's nothing new, I know that. Improv Everywhere has been doing large scale performances for years. I'm just hoping I walk into Grand Central one day and find myself surrounded by people singing and dancing "Hair" or any other Tony winning musical.

Beyonce - Video Phone Feat. Lady Gaga

Not gonna, lie. Like the rest of pophumanity, I expected a bit more from Beyonce and  Geeyonce. As far as the toned down Gaga, "Video Phone" is a collaboration for Beyonce's new CD, I Am...Yours.  So it makes sense that Gaga wouldn't steal the spotlight with her usual antics. Not only that but they work for different labels (Columbia and Interscope, respectively) and have slightly different demographics. Plus, I'm not sure we're ready for a Gaga-fied hip-hop video.  I'd say that's something to think about. Video's very kitschy but it's the song that bothers me. However, B and LG look great with those toy guns.