Google has finally “unveiled” Project Glass. I say “unveiled” because this isn’t a product that is in beta testing, alpha testing, or even a concept model phase. It’s just a somewhat cool video. I think their description (in the Google+ post, which ensures that 40 or 50 people will see it), shows that they’re starting from a somewhat flawed standpoint:
We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.
A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.
1. I fail to see how wearing this technology on your face means it’s out of the way.
2. There’s some incredible Orwellian doublespeak at work here, e.g., technology that “helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.” As far as I can tell, it doesn’t help you to explore your world at all. It helps Google to explore your world. And this notion of “your” world. What does that even mean? I think Google has flat out given up on the idea of connecting people, and instead, has decided to help them curate their lives, and to play to the collective bloated ego, started replacing “life” with “world.”
And I’m glad that Google Glass will help to put me back in the moment that it took me out of.
3. My favorite bit: “We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input.” In non-jargon, this translates to: we’re deathly afraid of creating yet another product that winds up failing, so just tell us, what is it that you want? We’ll do it, you just have to tell us.
Well, if you’re listening (watching?), Google Glass Team, I’ll tell you what I want. I want you to take this Steve Jobs quote to heart:
People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
(Sidenote: Is anyone else totally creeped out by the thought of a world where Google Glass has caught on and there are just herds of people standing around in the streets blankly staring straight ahead, and from afar, it looks like they’re all looking at each other, but everyone’s focused right in on the foreground, so up close their eyes look almost crossed, because they’re staring at what’s happening on (in?) their Google Glass?)
(Sidenote #2: From a tech standpoint, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is called Google Glass, and not Google Glasses. If the technology should ever make it to market, I’d bet one million fake dollars that Google provides the handse—I mean, eyeglass makers with the “Glass” technology, and then they’re responsible for manufacturing the actual glasses. It’ll give an entirely new meaning to the idea of platform fragmentation.)
Why I’m calling B.S. on Google Glasses
I’m just going to say it. I don’t think Google Glasses exist in the form that Google wants us to believe.
Have you watched the video?
Let me say that again: Have you watched the video?
Google wants you to believe that these glasses can help you find where a certain item is within whatever retail store you are inside. Really? Have you guys sent the Google Vans down the aisles of every store in America? I don’t think so, and even if they did, stores change layouts and inventory all the time. What’s the point in having something like that if you can’t trust it? That sounds like a supposed feature that would do little more than frustrate the user while he looks like a weirdo asking himself where the toothpaste is at the grocery store.
Google wants you to believe that you can make video calls from a rooftop with only your Google Glasses while you are holding a ukelele. Really? Are the carriers ok with video calls while you’re not on wifi? Let’s just assume that they are ok with it (even though they aren’t). How often are you going to video call to let someone see what you are looking at? I barely use FaceTime as it is. Even if you do use video calling from a smart phone often, this device lends its self to being used on the go. Do you have wifi on the go? Me neither.
The video shows initiating the checking of notifications and posting to Google+ (do people use that?) with your voice and somehow with magic gestures that don’t seem to even exist. Is there a button on the glasses? Do you hold your phone in your hand and push a button on it? It doesn’t add up. One could claim that it is completely voice activated, but based on the words spoken in the video, you would be playing music and flinging social network posts all over the place accidentally.
The icing on the cake is that Google is actually asking for suggestions as to what features people would like to have. You don’t ask for suggestions on a revolutionary product that you are about to ship. You don’t.
Google probably has figured out a way to display notifications, etc in front of your face. What I don’t believe that they have figured out is how to make it useful, user friendly, or marketable.
Q: So why come out with a video about a half-baked product right now?
A: They feel that there is value in beating someone else to announcing a similar product even if it isn’t finished. It will also help them to get feedback from potential users to help them refine something that I don’t think they have fully figured out yet.
Moral: Slow your roll. This thing is not as close as you may think.
Get your thinking done, put it in a trusted system, and then do your freakin’ work.
- Get your thinking done
Thinking and decision making must be done. In fact, thinking of what needs to get done, and deciding on the right course of action is often more difficult than the task its self. The problem with not deciding on the very first thing that needs to be done is that when it comes time to actually “do” you have to first figure out exactly what needs doing. This decreases productivity, causes, mental paralysis and is a major reason why people end up running down trails of internet distraction rather than actually getting work accomplished. Your brain can come up with all kinds of shiny interesting things to do while it wanders the halls of consciousness trying to figure out what it should be doing in the moment.
If you want to be able to confidently and quickly be able to whip through the things that need doing, you are best served by having a list of things that you have decided need doing. These items should be as specific as possible. They should be actionable items rather than nebulous concepts. An item like “Print and fill out LLC registration form” is going to get something done a lot quicker than an abstract item like “Start a great software company”. There is nothing wrong with identifying something that you would like to accomplish, such as starting a great software company. The problem is that “Start a great software company” is not actually a task that can be done. It is a project that likely consists of many sub projects like “LLC registered with the Secretary of State’s office”, “Company bank account opened”, “xyzcompany.com domain name purchased”, “Business plan drafted”, “Venture capital secured”, and “Software Egineer Hired”. In order to make progress on any of these items, you have to decide what the very first physical action that you can take on that particular project is. If your todo list is nothing more than a list of projects, then you do not have a todo list. You have a “to think about list”, because you can’t actually do any of the items on your list until you think about them and decide what to do with them.
- Put it in a trusted system
The human brain is a very powerful thing. It is great at coming up with ideas. It can imagine things that don’t exist and formulate plans to turn them into reality. It can solve major problems and can lay foundations that facilitate change, but one thing that your brain is not very good at is remembering things. You are driving when you remember that you need to send an email. You just got home from the office supply store when you remember that you need to buy printer ink. Etc. Etc. Your brain can be trusted to come up with great ideas, but it cannot be trusted to remember them. If you try to use your brain to store the the things that you need to do, important things will fall through the cracks. You may also feel a great amount of anxiety or feel completely overwhelmed by all the things you have to do. The best solution to this problem is to get the ideas, projects, and actions out of your head. They should be written down on paper, or typed into an electronic device that is regularly backed up. You have to be able to trust the medium that you are using, or this entire exercise is in vein. A beautiful thing happens when you get all this data out of your head and into a system that your brain can trust: suddenly a huge amount of the “RAM” in your head is liberated from remembering what needs doing and is available to think of new ideas. You very well may find that you have entered the boldest and most creative point of your life. Don’t believe me? Try it.
- Do your freakin’ work
Now that you have figured out what projects are important to you, you’ve identified the next physical steps you need to take to move forward with those projects, and you have parked them in a system that you can trust to store and retrieve those items, you are free to plow through your list and actually do your freakin’ work rather than having to constantly try to figure out what you need to be doing.
Does this sound overly complicated? It’s not nearly as complex as the alternative. Think once. Record the outcome of your thoughts. Get things done…or just continue to surf the web aimlessly while trying to ignore that nagging feeling that there is something important you are supposed to be doing to work toward your goals. That is, if you have actually taken the time to think about what those are…and I think you should.
Dad Pro Tip: Saturday morning light saber battles are 10x better when blasting Star Wars music from Spotify
How To Keep Your Mac Alive & Healthy: Part 2
Recap
In Part 1, I laid out the case for, and a few solutions to the first step in making sure that your Mac is healthy, which is to back your data up. Now that all your apps and files are securely backed up…Stop. Breathe. Relax. Just be still and know that you could erase your entire Mac hard drive right now with no regrets. We’re not about to do that, so once again, don’t worry.
On to bigger and better things
The simple procedure that you are about to read is very common knowledge to many in the Mac Community. However, there is a huge segment of Mac users who have never read or heard about it. It is for those users that I have written the following:
Your Mac’s operating system has a series of permissions that quite simply control what parts of your computer are allowed to do certain things. As you are using your Mac, these permissions mysteriously get changed around. I’ll spare you all the what’s, why’s, and how’s because really, it’s not that important. It just happens. Feel free to Google it if you need fodder for a good nap. Once every few months, it’s a good idea to repair these permissions since they can sometimes make your Mac act a little wonky. It takes neither a “Genius” nor a guru to tackle the simple task of repairing disk permissions. Here’s how to do the deed.
Repairing Disk Permissions
The first thing you need to do is to open your Disk Utility app. Which can be found by opening Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility or by simply typing Disc Utility into Spotlight Search, a.k.a. that little magnifying glass in right uppermost corner of your screen. Once the app opens, click on Macintosh HD in the sidebar. Then click on Repair Disk Permissions (circled in red in the picture below)
All that’s left to do is wait for the repair to finish, and you’re all done! Now give your Mac a kiss (or a side hug if the two of you are not that close yet) and promise it that you won’t go more that a couple of months without lovingly pressing the Repair Disk Permissions button again.
How To Keep Your Mac Alive & Healthy: Part 1
Your Macintosh is a beautiful piece of precision engineering. It helps you work, create, document, interact, and manage many different areas of your life. It gets used every day, toted in a messenger bag, and heavily typed on with your grubby Cheeto stained fingers among other things (wash your hands, please). Those of us who use our Macs as more than just a Facebookin’ Email-thingy often push our machines to the limit (which is awesome, I might add), but just like it’s necessary to change the oil in your car and perform routine maintenance on it, there are certain things that your Mac needs to keep it performing up to its full potential. This is the first post in a series aimed at helping you help the Mac you love to live a long, healthy, and productive life.
Part 1: Back It Up
Before we make any changes to your Mac or get any further along in this series, you need to make sure that your data is safe. If your hard drive crashed, or your Mac got stolen today would you lose any files, apps, or photos? If you answered yes, chances are either you’re not backing up your data at all, or you’re not backing it up regularly. Don’t be messin’ with a Mac that’s holding the only copy of every photo and file that is important to you. It’s almost 2012. You don’t want to be that guy who’s crying because he lost all his photos, important business documents, or an extravagant collection of cat memes. There are so many simple options when it comes to backing up data that there is almost no excuse for losing any of it. Apple makes backing up your data super simple and extremely effective. Let’s take a look at a few of the options.
How they really fix your iPhone and iPad at the Apple Store
The other day, I was sitting at the Genius Bar at my local Apple store while a really smart guy named Chris was deleting P-list files that were causing kernel panics on my Macbook Pro. We had some great conversation about the apps that we love and use regularly and even shared a high five over the Genius Bar when we discovered that we are both serious OmniFocus users.
Anyway, I overheard the guy next to me telling an Apple employee how he couldn’t get his computer to recognize his old iPhone after he decided to delete the contents and just use it as an iPod. While the Apple employee started typing on his computer (presumably to either document the issue or to search for a possible fix), I turned to the owner of the iPhone and said “If you put it into DFU mode, that will probably fix your issue”. The guys behind the Genius Bar started to snicker and my friendly Genius, Chris said “That’s exactly what we do in a situation like this. It’s not supposed to be public knowledge, but we fix about 90% of the issues that come in here by putting iOS devices into DFU mode”. If your iPhone freezes up or won’t function properly, you should try to restore it, but if that won’t work, fret not. There is hope.
DFU stands for Device Firmware Upgrade. It essentially enables your device to interact with iTunes without loading the operating system or boot loader. To enter DFU mode, just follow these steps:
1. Open iTunes and connect your iPhone/iPad to your computer
2. Turn the iPhone/iPad off by holding the wake/sleep button and then slide to power off. Press and hold the home button and the wake/sleep button at the same time and hold for 10 seconds
3. After precisely 10 seconds release the sleep/wake button, but keep holding the home button until an iTunes window opens telling you that it has detected an iPad/iPhone in recovery mode. Click OK when prompted and continue to wait for a few minutes while iTunes takes care of the rest.
4. Restore from your last backup if desired or just set it up as a new device and you are all done.
Congratulations! You just saved yourself a trip to the Apple Store. Now you can tell your friends what an Apple Beast you are. Later on you can prove it when they call you scared to death that their iPhone or iPad has seen its last day.
Hands on with Tether app for iPhone
I’m writing this post on my MacBook Pro using the 3G data connection from my iPhone via an app called Tether..and boy is it fast!
On Monday night as I was doing my typical iPhone browsing in bed before drifting off to sleep, I was tipped off by one of my Apple connections that an app that allows a laptop to be tethered to an iPhone and use it’s data connection had just become available. The bad news was that it was about to get yanked from the App Store because the wireless carriers generally frown on that sort of thing. I went ahead bought it for $14.99 because I knew that it would’t be around for long. When I woke up this morning, it was no longer for sale.
Tether requires the user to install an app on their laptop and iPhone. In order to use it, you simply have to open the app on your laptop, plug your iPhone into the laptop using your standard iPhone cord and open the iPhone app. That’s it. It begins working immediately and opens a web page for you. The experience so far has been great. Rumor has it that Nova Scotia LTD, the company that developed Tether is working hard to find a way back in to the App Store. I really hope that they can come to an agreement because this app is great. Now I just need a way to tether my iPad to the iPhone and all will be right in the land of flexible web access for my gadgets.
Books are dead to me
Paper Books Are Wonderful Have Issues.
I enjoy reading. I just hate the form factor of a paper book. They are all different and you have to find a way to hold each one so that you can get to the words that are tucked away inside. They make you work for it, and I get tired of holding them. Paper books are narcissistic sociopaths who demand coddling, a semi-permanent place of residence, and transportation. All this, and they don’t even have the decency to light up so that you can read them in bed. Jerks. Every time I want one, they are never around.
Turning Point
The book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson marked a serious turning point for me. This is the point where I gave up paper books for good. I elected to buy the iBooks version for one reason; THAT IS HOW STEVE WOULD HAVE WANTED IT TO BE READ. I had previously downloaded iBooks before, but had never gotten one that I fully intended to read from cover to cover (so to speak).
Finally, I was able to read a book on my terms. Since my iPhone goes wherever I go, my book was available whenever and wherever I wanted to access it; even if it was just for 5 minutes while I was on hold with customer service. One of the absolute best things about iBooks is the bookmark syncing through iCloud. I was able to read in bed on my iPad, place a bookmark, and then pick up at the same spot on my iPhone the next day at lunch. When I got home and wanted to read again, I would switch back to the iPad, and pick up right where I put the bookmark in my iPhone. The flexibility is beautiful. The only thing that is lacking is that Apple really needs to allow iBooks to be read on a Mac, in iTunes. You can listen to your music, and watch your videos, but for some reason you can’t read your iBooks. There is probably a workaround, but I have not taken the time to search one out.
Overall, the experience of using iBooks with an iPhone, iPad, and iCloud was spectacular. For now, the paper books that I own can stay, but I don’t plan on bringing many, if any home in the future (except for kids books, but that’s a different story altogether). I believe that we will see a day in the not too distant future where textbooks will be replaced by iPads in universities. My hope is that iPads will also replace textbooks for children in the public education system. Mass produced paper books were a crowning technological advancement for humankind, but time can only stand still for so long. Today, information is more flexible and portable than ever. It is time to change. The technology has gotten good enough to use, so unless I already own it, books are now dead to me; just like cassette tapes, VHS, and floppy disks.
Time marches on.
