Posts Tagged "Apple"

AT&T Data Plan Pricing Changes

Death Star

When AT&T announced they were taking away the $30 per month unlimited data plan in favor of tiered, capped plans. The internet’s knee-jerk reaction, of course, was that of complete and utter outrage. To me, the world wasn’t coming to an end, but I was annoyed to hear that they were taking away the unlimited data plan completely. That seemed to be backwards thinking, I thought, the way things are going with the world going mobile.

I checked our bills for Chesney’s iPhone from January on, and found out–shockingly–that her usage was under 200 MB, ranging from 64 MB to 143 MB at the most. Chesney, like me, uses her phone all the time and rarely makes calls, so I suppose most of that is while connected to wifi. So I’m happy to say that the change in AT&T’s pricing scheme will allow us to move down to the 200 MB/month plan and save us $15 every month!

We’ll lose the unlimited plan forever, but hey, if we’re well-below the lowest tier cap, we can always go up a tier and still be saving $5/month. Also I do think as time goes on, these caps will be changed to reflect the amounts of data users consume.

Now AT&T needs to follow up with cheaper voice plans. We’re paying the cheapest $40/month plan for minutes that we rarely ever use and never even come close to the cap. I would love to pay less for voice and more for data.

Just as an addendum, I looked at my corp account iPhone usage, and it was a little higher than my wife’s, but not by much, and still under the 200 MB/mo cap. I guess I don’t use that much data either.

Brand-new FileMaker.com

Months of work has led up to a brand-new FileMaker.com. This version of the website sheds the 3 or 4 (more?) previous designs, and brings the entire site into a single, unified design:

New FileMaker.com
The new FileMaker.com
The new FileMaker.com

The previous state of the website had iterations of old designs from years and years past running together simultaneously, with their own sub navigation, their own css, and to a degree, their own structure. As you can imagine, this was a huge headache for updating the site. Just to illustrate what a mess this was for the user, here’s random handful of pages on the old site, each pointing out 6 different sub navigation designs:

Sub-navigations
Yep, this is all the same website
Sub-navigations

We invested the time to bring all these different generations of the website under one, brand-new design and architecture. The sub navigation is now pretty consistent across the entire website. It was a big project up-front, but I know that it will really pay large dividends in the coming years with future product launches and general maintenance.

The global navigation underwent a huge overhaul. The old global navigation:

Old nav
Old
Old nav

…and the new one, using the superb protofish dropdowns:

New nav
New
New nav

As a side note, I made a big push to use some forward-thinking CSS 3 techniques, and drop full support of IE6 (Hallelujah!). Small CSS 3 enhancements like rounded corners, drop-shadows, and pseudo-selectors sped up development time, allowing me to literally re-code the old site in this new design in the insane project schedule we have here.

This was a huge effort, and a big redesign of the site was something that I have been wanting to do since I came onboard. I jumped at the chance to get it done in the small window of opportunity that I had. Congratulations to the web team for a job well-done. Now if only we could get a break–onto the next product launch…

—-

And since this took so long to write and post, FileMaker 11 has launched already. Bring on the purple!

Initial Thoughts on the iPad

The iPad. And I have a printout of it.

There’s been a lot of chatter on the internets the iPad, the new, long-rumored tablet Apple announced yesterday. The most interesting part about the iPad for me was the user interface. The iPhone was revolutionary, in large part due to the multitouch interface. At the time, there was just nothing else like it. The iPad makes the same move, only in its large form factor.

I really liked the thought that went into the UI of the applications that were demoed. Previous tablet PCs have been clunky ports of a desktop OS. Even the new generation of tablets running Android look this way (more on that later). Apple approached this differently–if you haven’t seen it already, it’s worth watching Apple’s intro movie for the iPad. If you could use your computer on a touch-screen OS like this, you wouldn’t even miss a mouse.

From the movie, you can see the iPad isn’t simply a port of OSX with touch screen capability. Nor is it a port of the iPhone OS in terms of the UI. The apps themselves have been redesigned to be a touch interface for the larger form-factor and what you get is an elegant, well-designed OS. And from all early accounts from people that have actually spent time with the iPad, it works beautifully.

Caleb’s Computer?

I immediately started to think, is this going to be the way we interact with our computers? (By then will they even be called “computers?”) The mouse was a great invention in bridging the gap between the user and the screen, but using your finger makes so much more sense.

Sure, the external keyboard and mouse won’t be replaced anytime soon, especially for people like me who work on a computer all day, but I believe there will come a day when touch-screen interfaces will have matured to the point where it is comparable and eventually replaces these old input devices.

Hit or Miss?

As to whether or not people will actually buy the iPad, who knows? This is new territory not only for Apple, but for the industry. If haven’t noticed, it seems like every major manufacturer has announced their own tablet recently, most running Andriod. The HP Slate, Viewsonic VTablet 101, Lenovo IdeaPad, and Dell’s unnamed tablet to cite a few.

The most successful device that I can think of that is in the same form factor is Amazon’s Kindle. I like Kevin Rose’s post which compares the iPad to the Kindle DX:

Kindle DX 9.7” – $489.00
—
1024×768 color display upgrade – $1.00
Internet browsing upgrade – $1.00
iPod w/16GB upgrade – $1.00
Run iPhone apps upgrade – $1.00
1Gz A4 processor upgrade – $1.00
H.264 720P HD video upgrade – $1.00
Bluetooth upgrade – $1.00
10hr battery upgrade – $1.00
Multi-touch display upgrade – $1.00
Digital compass/accelerometer – $1.00 
—
Your cost: iPad $499.00

So true…Amazon is going to have to do something about that Kindle DX price point. When you put the Kindle side-by-side with the iPad, it looks like technology from 10 years ago:

Kindle DX and the iPad

The Kindle DX and iPad, both at the $500 price point

There were plenty of mp3 players on the market before the iPod debuted and shook up–and popularized–the industry. The cell phone market was mature and flooded with handsets before the iPhone came in and shook up the (smartphone) industry. It will be interesting to see in the coming years if the iPad can do the same.

Google Chrome OS and Life on the Web

Google Chrome OS on a Macbook ProI have had a couple days to let the news of Google’s Chrome OS announcement sink in and the more I think about it, the more end up thinking about the future of our computing.

A Google OS? I was excited about the mere rumor of this waaaaay back in 2005 (my short blog post). But undoubtedly this begs the obvious question: how will stack up against Windows? Or any “traditional” browser like OSX or Linux, for that matter. From reading the announcement, it doesn’t sound like Chrome OS will really be a direct competitor. The initial focus will be on “cloud computing,” which means doing all of the work that you need to do online. Rather than being a massive OS that will will have everything that you need locally on your hard drive, Chrome OS will be a lightweight gateway into accessing everything over the web.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds.

The Google Universe

This strategy is perfect for Google since they happen to be the leader in computing on the web. They offer Google Docs, Google Apps, Gmail, Google Calendar – most everything the average user will need. The only thing holding users back from going completely online is their comfort zone with native applications. It’s a big change to think about using an online text-editor, rather than loading up Microsoft Word.

See Ya Online

Web 2.0 Logos, by Stabilo Boss on Flickr
Web 2.0 Logos,
by Stabilo Boss on Flickr

But the future of computer use, in my opinion is just that. Everything is moving in the direction of everything being online, available to you anywhere you are. Bandwidth is getting faster and becoming more widespread. Online access everywhere is coming. Companies see this trend and are adapting – the most attractive software almost always has an online component to it, and many new companies are developing web applications for use exclusively online. The rise of the new class of laptops, netbooks is evidence of this trend of cheap, fast, and light, made for the user who spends most of their time on the computer doing things online–there’s no need for lots of storage and a huge processor when you are doing most of your tasks online, in a web browser.

Not convinced? Chances are, you are already halfway there yourself. Think about how much of what you do online right now. Have a Facebook account? Do you use Gmail? Plan your week in Google Calendar? Photo-ordering? Banking or bill pay? For the average user, there really isn’t much that can’t be done online. Besides the every day tasks that were just mentioned, there are even web applications for project-planning, photo-editing, and even intensive graphics work.

It’s coming, and while local computing will never completely go away, especially with professionals in many fields, I believe the masses will be doing most of their computer-time online. And with that in mind, Google Chrome OS has the potential to be the leader/trailblazer in this kind of computing.

To top it all off, Google Chrome OS is free and open-source. “Don’t be evil” indeed.