if connected

It’s Thursday, four days after European clocks changed to what others call daylight saving and I’m still finding clocks stuck on GMT.

I’ll forgive those without an Internet connection like the wall clock in the kitchen, but way too many devices should know better. Windows Mobile still seems awkward, probably because I’m still running 6.0. The brand new Blackberry Bold hooked up to my company’s Blackberry Enterprise Server really should have updated itself. Two years ago I wouldn’t have cared.

But iPhone has changed everything. It just worked.

A former colleague wrote recently that ‘save file’ should have no place in this day. Everything should be saved automatically all of the time. I think manually changing the clocks twice a year should follow it into extinction.

Sidenote – This is the first post I’ve written on the new version of WordPress for iPhone. It’s a big improvement and worth returning to if you’ve tried and rejected it in the past. It means I can post more easily from wherever I happen to be:

Today, I’ve been testing out an Arc mouse, which Microsoft created for laptops. People forget that Microsoft makes hardware — at least mice and keyboards — and has done for years, way before the Xbox or the Zune.

The Arc mouse looks like something Apple designed, except it’s black. However, Microsoft’s website does the Arc no justice, unlike Apple’s representation of its gear.

The Arc is both innovative and yet still does many things right:
(Many flawed products have far too much innovation.)

• The mouse folds for transport. The action of opening it up automatically switches it on.
• The tiny USB wireless transmitter attaches to the mouse underside using magnets when not in use. Plus Microsoft supplies a pouch to keep the mouse clean.
• The fold design makes the mouse large to hold, but small to put into a bag. It’s close to a best of both worlds between desktop and laptop.
• Works without any extra software on both Windows and Mac OS. Although, to have the extra button trigger Expose on Mac OS requires a driver install.

So far, so good, but like all mobile products the jury is out until I’ve been using it for a few days.

After the pain of trying to download Windows 7 and failing repeatedly (you need to use Internet Explorer which installs an Akamai download manager), I’ve installed the beta on a Mac using Boot Camp. I’ve previously used Vista 32bit on the same machine. Win7 seems to be working fine.

So far, only had time for initial impressions:-

• Appearance – Looks very like Vista with the exception of the start bar and the system tray. I rather liked Vista’s look — especially the translucent window border — so this isn’t bad by me. But if Microsoft is trying to distance Windows 7 from Vista then they should try harder!
• Memory – Idle memory on start-up is lower than Vista. I’m not sure how much lower as I’m making a guesstimate by comparing this vanilla install with a Vista that had many applications set-up, some of which ran on start.
• Sleep/wake – Goes in and out faster than my old Vista install, but slower than XP or Mac OS.
• Functionality – It really doesn’t seem much different. The only enhancement I’ve noticed and liked is that the ‘tray’ icon for the current WiFi network shows signal strength. The hyped ‘jump’ menus from the application task bar icons seem a little pointless.
• Boot camp / running on a Mac – The Vista Apple boot camp hardware drivers installed just as they would on Vista and seem to be working. This appears to confirm that there is little under the bonnet difference. I will try running Windows 7 under VM Ware Fusion later this week.

This post was originally published on my Forrester blog.

The usual predictions, rumours, hype, scaremongering are all in full force this week for the two early January shows. Pundits speculate on what will be announced ahead, and then attempt to retro-fit what products are launched into their world view. It’s a dangerous game, and not only because so much of what is written is wrong, and worse, is proven wrong within hours of going online.

Much speculation before and during the event has been on the impact of the economy on new products to be announced. The reality is that the major product launches we are seeing now were on final approach when the economy hit the rocks last autumn. Product managers have had time to make small tweaks, or make brave last minute no-go decisions, but not to build from scratch for the 2009 world.

This deafening noise of speculation and numerous launches obscures the key strategies with which the most successful companies operate. Too much writing focuses on tactics, such as the specifics of inpidual new products. But very launches are really ground-breaking. This is why so much media attention focuses on Apple: It’s their ability to do something radical and apparently revolutionary which delights headline writers.

We’ll see later today what Apple launches.

Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that it is pursuing the long game. Each inpidual product meets a need and looks to be profitable but simultaneously ties into other parts of Apple’s product range to together move the company forward. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. There are few companies for which that is true.

My forecast: Half of peoples’ predictions for new Apple products will be completely wrong, a further third will happen but months or years later, and no more than one fifth of the product guesses will come true this week. The most innovative Apple products will come from the spoofers.

Back from two weeks on leave from the office. I had a pile of books I wanted to read, websites to build, blog posts to write. But family and friends filled the time almost completely. This is not a particular bad thing, but!

I’ve spent much of today musing about the trade-offs we make to save us time. I’m hosting this blog on wordpress.com rather than self-hosting. Why? I’m choosing to focus on writing rather than keeping the server patched and up to date. I’m ceding some control over look/feel for example, in return for time saving. Blog software and other content management tools do the same, why self-host WordPress rather than building the site from scratch in PHP, Rails or Drupal or whatever? It’s quicker.

Elsewhere, I’ve been using Mac OS more and more. Why? Because I spend less time patching it with software updates, fixing things that break, and it starts up, shuts down, and goes in and out of sleep fast. The downside is that there’s less software available for it and much less legal hardware I can run it on. Sure I could grab a MSI netbook and put OS X on it, but to my mind that defeats the point. If I want to spend time tinkering I may as well run Linux on my main machine.

This applies right across many areas. Why do people buy music on iTunes? It’s not cheap compared to retailed CDs now. The music is lower quality and most has DRM that restricts what devices can play it back. However, iTunes is quick and easy to use. It’s faster than visiting a shop or waiting for a CD to arrive from Amazon. People trade off sound quality and freedom for speed and save time.

Why do people write so much about other trade-offs — money/quality/size/weight/battery/features — but not time?

Quicktime video playback wasn’t working at all within Firefox on the Mac. Safari was fine. I did the usual thing and Googled the problem — always a good idea with any tech issue — and found lots of people had the same experience. But I couldn’t see a fix anywhere.

I found Adblock (original add-on) was the cause. I uninstalled it and I switched to Adblock Plus instead, and Quicktime now works fine in Firefox.

Every time I set up a new computer it seems to take ages. I’ve wondered how much of that pain were subjective perceptions caused by the number of clicks / restarts vs the actual time taken.

This time I kept note.

The new laptop has both Windows XP and Mac OS installed. I can make comparisons as both Mac and Windows are using the same hardware.

Scorecard Windows XP, using bootcamp. (Note, this could have taken longer: I downloaded Windows updates on an above average speed connection (12Mbps), apps had been downloaded ahead):-

• Windows = 23 minutes for XP itself (SP2).
• Windows updates = 42 minutes. Included four reboots to install and update Windows.
• Drivers = 14m… another reboot
• Windows applications = 124 minutes, including a further two reboots.

Windows total = 203 minutes, or 23 minutes over three hours, with seven reboots. But I’ve not still not migrated across all my data yet or tweaked all the numerous application preferences. The worst of it was that I had to be present for every minute.

Mac OS = Unsure exactly, as I didn’t need to do much and left it running, probably about three hours in total.

The Mac ‘migration assistant’ is one of the Mac’s best kept secrets. It will transfer everything from either another Mac or a Time Machine backup. For me, it copied across all my applications (including third party ones, both paid and free), preferences and documents. I left it running which made it feel painless.

I fell of my chair when I realised what it had successfully done and how much effort it saved me.

Migrating to a Mac is about as painful as migrating from one PC to another. But migrating from an old Mac to a new one is absolutely simple, provided both run Leopard.