Marc – Page 19 – Lost in Logic

Google Photos

June 7, 2015 MarcLeave a comment

Google announced a new service recently called 'Google Photos', and I was instantly intrigued. I don't use many Google services apart from search, but keeping memories safe is top of my priorities when it comes to online services.

I currently use OneDrive (and before that, Dropbox) to backup photos and was thinking of using Apple's iCloud Photo Library in addition to this. I like the idea of having every photo I've ever taken (in recent memory at least) available from the photo picker in iOS, and on my Mac. However from what I've heard in reviews, doing this slows down iOS devices (I have an iPhone 5, which not being the latest device from Apple means it's inevitably slowed down anyway) and I also want more control over what gets stored on my device. Apple may make nice looking products, but when it comes to storage they are stingy as hell, and my phone is forever warning me that I'm running low on space. I tried iCloud Photos for a few months and found it didn't save space on my phone as promised, I still ended up with the majority of space on my phone used by the photos I'd taken. It's also not cheap – you get 5GB 'free' from Apple – no matter how many devices you own. So me, with an iPhone, 2 iPads (home and work), as well as a Mac get the same as someone with just an iPod Touch. Out of this 5GB comes any backups you make (which is the majority in my experience), any emails you receive to your iCloud email account, and of course any photos you upload to iCloud Photos. Buying more space is expensive considering you've already paid a premium for the hardware in the first place.

So a combination of being expensive and not that good made me decide to stick with OneDrive (despite the fact it can be buggy, it's at least cross platform and a good price, you get 1TB of space and Microsoft Office for less than £10 a month). Then Google announced Google Photos….

With any Google product there are two things you need to consider: How long will it last before they shut it down, and what are they doing with my data?

I hope this product lasts, and doesn't go the way of Google Buzz, Reader, Notebook, iGoogle or Latitude (and Google+ ?). With Google, you never know. That's a big risk when you're trusting it with your lifelong memories. Luckily it's free (if you are happy for all images to be down-sampled to a maximum of 16 megapixels – my camera is nowhere near that resolution, so I am) so I would urge anyone using it to also use a service like Dropbox or OneDrive who have a better reputation when it comes to shuttering services.

What are they doing with the data? I've no doubt the GPS coordinates tagged inside every photo will be extremely useful to Google for targeting me with adverts. It's basically my location history. I'm fine with this really.

The app itself is very well written. If you have 3000+ photos to upload like me, then you'll want to download the helper application that will sit in the background and upload instead of using the browser interface. The web interface scrolls very smoothly and makes it easy to go back a decade without trying to load everything in-between. Unlike the OneDrive web interface, it correclty uses the EXIF data in images to pull out the date, rather than the file's timestamp. In OneDrive it looks like I took all my photos in March 2015, because that's when I copied them accross from Dropbox. Google Photos isn't so stupid, thankfully. Like Apple's iCloud Photos, you can make edits from within the Google Photos interface. Apple's approach cleverly stores what you changed in a photo, as opposed to the end result. This means you can adjust the brightness on one your phone, but undo it and add a filter on your laptop without any loss in quality (it doesn't create a losssy JPEG each time). I'm not sure if Google is doing something simular, but it wouldn't supprise me.

So all in all, I am impressed – I'm just worried it will be switched off in 4 years when Google get bored of it.

Can an iPad replace a laptop, seriously?

May 3, 2015 Marc

Ever since I was convinced to buy an iPad 4 years ago, I’ve been a massive fan and predicted they would eventually replace laptops for most consumers. Just as not everyone needs a truck, not everyone needs a laptop right?

It turns out however, that iPad sales are falling. This is more likely a combination of people having much larger phones, iPads being reliable and not needing replacing, lack of innovation (today’s fifth generation iPad does the same as a second generation, only faster), and the fact that the vast majority of consumers don’t need anything more powerful than a phone. It saddens me that despite the Internet being a place where anyone can publish anything at very low cost (or for free in many cases), most people use it to consume TV and post frivolous Facebook updates that don’t require much more than a mobile phone – but that’s another topic altogether.

At the other end of the scale you have business and professional users, who tend to use laptops because they offer much more power. Processing power isn’t as far off as you might think, the power difference is now in the software. Take for example a simple task I needed to achieve last week – downloading an MP3 from a web site (legit I might add! It was to accompany a course I was taking) and add it to my iTunes Match Library so it would be available on all of my devices. This is easy to do on a Mac or Windows laptop, but impossible on an iPad. That’s ridiculous.

The other software issue that holds back these devices is the transient nature of applications. At any time your application might get terminated due to lack of memory. This rarely results in any loss of work, as developers usually code with this in min (until iOS 4, this happened overtime you left an app). Not many developers both to restore the state of an application (as they are suppose to), and even when they do having to wait for it to load again is painful.

So the answer is no, an iPad can’t replace a laptop at the moment. I would like to see Apple push forward with this vision. Why not have a simplified version of Xcode for the iPad? It could be a great way to introduce people to programming (and could feature the Playground function introduced last year). The built in applications should be updated to support ‘Open In’ so I can open that MP3 file in the Music app, for example.

For many users, nothing will beat a dual screen setup with a mouse and keyboard – but I can’t help thinking that 90% of my non-work computing needs could be done on an iPad if the software were better.

Update: 31/5/2015

I’ve been using an external keyboard with my iPad a lot recently, so hardware wise it’s more on par with a laptop. Here’s what I miss most from a full blown Windows/Mac laptop:

The a ability to have more than one document open within a single app. Some apps such as Mail support having mutipe drafts open at once, but all the apps I use most frequently such as Microsft Word, Pages and Excel can only open one document at a time. It takes about 30 seconds to close a document and to load another, which just slows me down.
Lack of keyboard shortcuts – such as being able to press ‘Enter’ to send a message, or CTRL + Enter to send an email. Also being able to switch between documents / apps using the keyboard would help too.
Applications getting unloaded from memory. Or rather lazy developers not bothering to reload the state of an app when it gets reloaded. Again, like with the document switching – it gets in the way when you return to a presentation and find the app has gone back to the open screen.

Reading v Arsenal – FA Cup Semi Final

April 19, 2015 MarcLeave a comment

What a day. Proud of my local team for managing to hold Arsenal to a draw during the first 90 minutes, and for out playing them for much of the second half. Arsenal are a team who are second in the Premiership and play in the Champion's Leauge – yet Reading came within a whisper of winning. So close… But still a great day out.

How can anyone not get excited as they approach Wembley?

As the sun sets, and full time approaches, they was still some hope...