Land Amongst The Stars

With a cool new Web 2.0 url and nice prepackaged redesign I’m turning Hafestus into my personal medium of written expression. Clearly not at the level where a change, even as big as I feel this to be, is actually demanding of a update post like this I want to do it anyway.

I do have my personal blog that I would occasionally write on, though the thoughts I expressed there can best be described as “unorganized.” So with that I hope to use Hafestus as a more organized and professional way to get my thoughts into the World Wide Web.

I’ll continue with my personal blog’s general themes of technology and culture while also adding lifestyle as another adjective. I have semi lofty goals for Hafestus, hoping to maybe build up a small reader-base while also developing a portfolio. So here’s me shooting for the moon, though even if I miss…

Now Imagine If Amazon Had Bought Palm And WebOS

parislemon:

Dan Frommer:

What WebOS did well is exactly what Amazon’s Kindle Fire needs: A beautiful, clever interface, second only to Apple’s. (And even better than iOS in some ways.) Combined with Amazon’s expertise in e-commerce, digital media, and its aggressive pricing, a Kindle TouchPad might be an even more compelling device than what Amazon has built on its own.

Love that idea. Wish it would have happened.

Reading In The Modern Day, The Debate

Most say eReaders are a dying breed, eventually going to be completely phased out by tablets. I disagree, I think eReaders are going to be here for a long while, they wont be as strong as they once were but they’ll stay around.

Price

The cheapest tablet I’ve seen that’s actually worth the money is the Kindle Fire for 200$, and that arguing that the Fire is a full fledged tablet, which is in dispute, at least in my mind. Likewise, the cheapest eReader I’ve seen, again, that’s worth the money is the Kindle for 80$. That’s  huge difference, granted you get a lot more features with a tablet, but that brings me right into my next point…

Features

eReaders let you read books, that’s it. You might be able to listen to music or browse the web a bit, but when you get one you get it to read, that’s it. Tablets can do this and so much more. Now this is arguably a folly of tablets, here’s why: when I read I book, I want to be completely dedicated to that book, I don’t want distractions from my roommates’ awful music preference or my phone’s beckoning text tone. I prefer a completely silent and distraction-free zone so I can fall fully into the story I’m reading. Tablets don’t really have this feature, because in addition to your book-reading app you’ve got Facebook, Twitter, email, instant messaging, etc. So eReaders may only let you read books, but books only let you read books too.

Battery Life

My Kindle’s battery can literally last a month, at least. Tablets will last you a day if you’re lucky, or the brightness is turned down, and you don’t use it much. When you want to read a book you don’t want to have to worry about battery life, that’s just another distraction.

Screen

eReader screens are different than tablet screens, this is part of the reason the battery life can last so long. It’s also the reason you can take an eReader and read anywhere, even if you’re in direct sunlight. This direct sunlight on a tablet screen will make it very difficult to read. This continues with the fact that you can take an eReader anywhere and still be able to enjoy it. Also, as seen in the picture below, finger prints are much easier to see on a tablet vs an eReader, not that that is an issue when the screen brightness is up (using more battery) but it can come to light (is there a pun in there?) every once in a while. In tablet’s defense, the back lit screens are definitely nice when reading at night.

                    

Size

I think 90% of the time when I’m reading I’m laying in my bed. That’s one reason I love eReaders and tablets over books; I don’t have to roll over in bed whenever I move to the other page. But in the tablet vs eReader debate, it comes down to this: when you’re laying down with the book/eReader/Tablet sideways so you can read, it’s a lot easier when it’s smaller. In fact, in most cases its easier when it’s smaller. Pack it away more places, carry more things along with it, since it’s lighter. You don’t really get a lot of this with tablets. They’re bigger and heavier, and even with seven inch tablets they’re ticker and still heavier. My kindle weighs less than a normal book.

The nice thing about eReaders is that they’re a book, well actually hundreds of books, with the potential to become another hundred, with many of the modern-web capabilites we’ve grown accustomed to without distracting us from our intent: to enjoy a great story. Tablets are great too, and reading a book on them can be just as enjoyable as reading a book anywhere else, and because of that I think tablets will replace eReaders in a lot of people’s backpacks. But eReaders will survive, because they’ve got some cool features that can beat even the best tablet, and I know I’ll cherish mine for years to come.

Special thanks goes to Hunter S.

Windows 8: Tablet > Desktop

                                  

Windows 8 is getting closer and closer to its public release and I’m excited. So I thought I would take a moment to discuss how Windows 8 is different and a serious flaw I’ve seen in it.

The biggest difference between Windows 8 and Windows 7 is really just the addition of a more or less reinvented Start button. Instead of a little window with different options the start button will bring you to the Metro interface to interact with all the stuff that’s there. The metro interface itself is the big thing with Windows 8, it is the harbinger of the touch interface which will then bring Windows to the tablet market.

The tablet market is big right now, and it’s only going to get bigger. Although there are very little competitors in this market right now, Google’s Android, Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire. With the introduction of Windows I have no doubt it will fly past Android and the Fire as well to compete head to head with the iPad. Why do I say that? Well Windows has one massive thing going for it, and that’s the huge user base it already has. That’s millions of people that already know how to use it, so instead of getting an Android tablet or even an iPad they’re going to get a Windows tablet- because that’s what they’re used to.

Now taking a couple steps forward into the future of personal computing I want to tell my image of how it will look. Instead of everyone (or nearly everyone) having their own laptop to browse the web and watch videos, etc etc. they will have a tablet. These tablets will have just as much juice behind them as laptops nowadays do, maybe more even. Laptops will basically stop being useful because your tablet will be able to do almost everything a laptop could do. Now, for those things a tablet couldn’t do, say professional work or school assignments then you move over to the desktop to do those. So, wrapping it up, everyone will have a tablet to do most of their stuff, professionals and schools will have super-powered desktops to handle the big stuff, households may also have one of these to share.

Now with that thought process in mind Windows 8 is very exciting, because it’s literally the desktop on a tablet, so until we get to the point explained above you’ll still be able to do things on a Windows 8 tablet that you may not be able to do on other tablets. But here’s the flaw, the Windows 8 desktop experience has been crippled. Not in a fatal way, but crippled nonetheless. Tablets demand simplicity and larger buttons for fingers and mobility. Desktops with the precision of a mouse and the generally large space for things like processors, CPUs , and other innards like that, desktops can just handle more also because of this they stay in one place. But with Windows 8 Microsoft is merging the mobile space and the stationary space is a weird way, instead of making the desktop version similar to the mobile version they seemed to have just fed the desktop to the mobile and treat the features of desktop computers as some sort of app or after-product when, at least on a desktop, it’s doing to be the most important part.

A quick example: in the Metro start menu you move left and right to access different apps, on a phone or tablet this is as easy as sliding a finder across the screen. On a desktop computer you’ve got to drag with your mouse, which isn’t really the most elegant of solutions, although you could also scroll with your mouse, but that’s confusing since you scroll down to move right and up to move left. I suppose though, we can imagine future mouses to have a more touch interface, similar to trackpads, which may be able to handle the touch interface of Windows 8 a little better. We will have to see about this though, as it comes down to the discretion of whoever makes the actual computers, and not necessarily Microsoft.

Windows 8 is a big step in the right direction for Microsoft, and Metro is absolutely awesome, but they may have gone just too far with it, either that or they have to be open to some changes down the road. 8 definitely offers a lot of great features but whether the crippling of their core product is worth it or not, we’ll have to see.

Facebook Is A Massive Video Site Waiting To Happen

                     


YouTube is very popular. 60 hours of video is uploaded a minute, over 4 billion videos viewed daily and 800 million unique visitors a month. Those are all very impressive.

The root of this popularity for YouTube is social, no doubt about it. The way videos go viral, and the way we find out about cute cat videos is from friends. With that said, Facebook has what YouTube is lacking- a strong social foundation. All your friends are already on Facebook, so why don’t you upload that video of Frank falling off his skateboard onto Facebook so everyone can see it instead of uploading it to YouTube and then sharing that link with everyone?

Facebook as a video site has the potential to take its 800 million users and push that over the billion mark. It also gives Facebook another place to put it’s ads, which is all anyone cares about anyway.

In fact, Facebook could replace a lot of stuff. Flickr, Spotify, Twitter, Tumblr, the list goes on. The reason it can replace all these different services is because they all survive off of social-sharing, which is literally what Facebook is. In fact it seems the whole Internet depends on social sharing. Alicia Eler wrote a nice peice for Read Write Web saying that social networks are destroying (read: taking over) the Internet.

I’m not a huge fan of Facebook, but it seems to have taken the place of a requirement on the Internet, and even the real world as a way to stay connected and even meet new people. How many people have heard or said “Just add me on Facebook and we’ll get in contact!”

Facebook no doubt knows all this and is making plans to make them real, but until that point comes let’s all enjoy the diversity of the Internet while we still have it.

Smart Is More Than A Word

I’ve talked about this before and I doubt this will be the last time I talk about it, but look at what the smart phone has done to the world. I’ve outlined elsewhere what the smart phone could potentially replace in the not too distant future, but it doesn’t stop there. Smart phones started the mobile computing craze, and therefore the tablet craze. Also leading to other far reaching developments in the way we interact with the web and the way the web interacts with the world.

Going a little more in depth smart phones and tablet are really just a different way to interact with the web, which is what is changing the world. With that said, this new concept of smart TVs will further change the way we interact with media, by putting more control into our hands.

Right now Netflix and Hulu are two of the biggest names in (legal) online video streaming. With more coming onto the scene like Crackle and Vdio while others offer the opportunity for original and individual content like YouTube and Vimeo. Over the years these services, as well as others, have helped mold the way we watch TV shows and movies: on demand for free or cheap. NBC, TNT, USA and others have all adopted a similar plan by offering their shows online.

This has sparked my idea of the future of TV.

Right now we access TV shows mostly through TV, at least at first, then they become available online. With the introduction of smart TVs the line between television and Internet will start to fade, until it is completely gone. Soon, instead of going to channel 5 to watch Community, you’ll go to nbc.com. You’ll also be able to access the same TVs shows anywhere you are through your computer, tablet, or phone. HBO is a perfect example of this, they offer apps on almost every mobile operating system as well as many different smart TV operating systems. Giving it’s subscribers the ability to start a show at home and pick it up while they wait for their flight at the airport. Soon everyone will do this.

I can even imagine a time when movies won’t release in theaters but will release to the public, “available at ——.com on July 5th.” The theater is becoming more and more an experience, and for $7 a trip at least, it can become a pricey experience too. The reason people go to the movies is social, but imagine how many people want to watch a movie the weekend it comes out but no one else can or does, so that one person stays home. That’s just as much a lost sale as pirating the movie, which he may end up doing. Now imagine if that same person could just watch that movie the weekend it came out from the comfort of his couch on his shiny smart TV? I expect an huge market for the entertainment industry here, if they would just adapt to it.

That’s one very cool idea that will be on everyone’s minds as smart TVs become more capable and, more importantly, more widely used, but the walls of Jericho didn’t fall in a day. Eventually though, the entertainment industry will hear a very similar shout demanding the collapse of the way they do things, who will be spared has yet to be determined.