Category: Tech

Google Photos

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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….

Screen Shot 2015-06-07 at 08.24.25

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?

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. 

Apple Watch

Marc1 Comment

So the details are finally in, and I have to admit – I’m slightly disappointed. I was hoping Apple would unveil some major new functionality at last week’s event, but it was just filling the gaps between what we already knew.

In essence, the watch has 3 main functions: a fitness tracker, notification viewer and of course telling the time. You could also add a 4th function: fashion accessory.

The fitness tracker part of it excites me most, as I have used the Nike Fuelband previously and found it was good at telling me how inactive I was, convincing me to workout more often. After 6 or 7 months, I didn’t need to wear it anymore as I kind of knew when I was active and when I wasn’t. I guess if I was marathon training I might need more detail, but surely and GPS enabled Garmin watch would be more suited in this case? So for me I’m partially excited about this aspect of the watch, but it doesn’t seem groundbreaking to me.

The notification viewing aspect of the watch doesn’t excite me at all. Mainly because it requires I have my phone in the same building. Not being a high-flying executive who needs to view every email within seconds, the thought of having notifications on my wrist makes me shudder. If the watch had cellular networking and meant I could leave the house without a phone, then I would be interested. In fact, one day I see the iPhone being obsolete and the watch being the main connectivity device. When they need a bigger screen, people will tether their iPad to their watches.

Telling the time is of course a very useful function. At work (where lets face it, I spend a good chunk of my time) I have a computer in front of me with the time omnipresent, and typing with a watch on can be uncomfortable. So I only need this functionality at weekends or when I go out after work. My Casio serves its purpose here – do i really need an Apple Watch for this?

Then there’s the fashion element. Apple has, since the iPod been a fashion brand – though a slightly geeky  fashion brand. I have a feeling Smart Watches will end up like calculator watches in the 1980’s and early 1990’s – looking dated and ‘of their time’. Then there’s the ridiculously priced ‘Apple Watch Edition’ made out of solid gold. I get that some watches cost tens of thousands of pounds. However, isn’t part of what justifies the price of a Rolex that fact that they have been engineering watches for over a hundred years, and have a reputation for exceptional quality? If Volvo released a Rolls Royce-priced car, it wouldn’t make it comparable to a Rolls Royce. Making something expensive doesn’t make it fashionable. I personally go out of my way not to wear overtly branded clothing (to my dismay, the craze of wearing ‘Super Dry’ plastered over your front like you’re selling children’s nappies door-to-door hasn’t subsided yet, at least in the UK), and so I wouldn’t want a watch that was too ‘showy’.

Of course I haven’t mentioned the apps yet. This is where I think the watch could excel. it could be like the iPad, which I was doubtful about upon its release, but now I think it is the world’s greatest personal computer. Will I buy an Apple Watch? No. I’ll wait and see what the second generation has to offer. My hope is it will have a way of using the device purely over WiFi (I accept cellular is  a long way off for battery reasons) so I could realistically go out for the evening, and as long as the place I am going has WiFi, I can still keep in touch.