Google’s Notebook

I know it’s quite easy to say “I’ve been thinking about this” when something not even remotely related to what you want to talk about spurs out of the vast ocean that is the web, but it’s true this time. And besides, I don’t need an excuse to talk about whatever I want to with you guys.

After watching countless Google I/O sessions, reading a ton of stuff on Google, tweeting with people I’ve never met IRL about the company and so on, one thing has always been clear to me: Google is fond of MacBooks. Now, from what I’ve heard, inside the company you’re free to work on either Mac or Windows, but one thing is very clear to me: Google adores Unix, and its favorite kind of Unix, is OS X.

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An unforeseen consequence of ditching my smartphone for my brick-dumb Huawei is that I don’t have a camera on my phone. And so try to imagine this: I hung out with a girl for multiple months. Saw her multiple times a week. She even met some of my friends, I even met a few of her friends. And I don’t have a single photo of her.

So, I’ve been quite busy for the last 5 days with pictures. First it was with my own pictures, and then it was with a set of 300 pictures of my friends. It doesn’t look like it, but it is a lot of work for me; a lot of work that I incidentally love to do.

Whilst waiting for another assault of Facebook notifications, I started spinning my usual set of 10-35 Chrome tabs (yup) and one of then happened to be this article by “the man who’s (nearly) spent a full year off the Internet”. 

Quite a story. Quite a paragraph; that must be the single most emotional piece of writing I’ve read in quite a while.

Against The Informer(s)

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Apparently, I’m not the only one who deeply misses Manhattan’s most flattering show in recent years. I thought I had it bad, chasing every week the ups and downs of a set of cool kids fresh out of high school, fresh out of college (wait! did they ever finish? I can’t remember a graduation episode…) who clashed with each other barely understanding what was the right way to cope with their feelings, but at the same time, I absolutely loved the show. It wasn’t entirely reasonable, the show barely made sense in the real world, but it made sense to me, because it got rid of anything else that wasn’t just “feelings” and it allowed its characters a “do what you want and get away with it” approach, no strings attached; it was all pure desire, emotion, and self-satisfaction. Something we barely get in a world where we’re more busy of being kind and taking care of others instead of pursuing what we really want and asking for it if it’s in someone else’s hands to give it to us: and yes, you’re allowed to take those words and give them the meaning you need them to have, that’s why I wrote for you.

Right, let’s cut to the chase.

About a week ago, I noticed my group of close friends started “liking” a page in Facebook, it was called “El Informer de la ULL”. Its cover picture and its name, translated to Spanish “The Universidad de La Laguna’s Informant” made me believe at first it was some kind of politics movement; an insider who was within the main campus of the University and who was happy to spill the beans on what exactly was going on with the money the University has been raking in, especially this year when they handsomely increased our tuition fees. Except it wasn’t that.

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iPad 5 The thing I like the most about tumblr, is the wicked ways in which it allows you to present your own posts. This one for example, allows me to start by calling you out to look at the picture first, then read. If I do it otherwise, you’ll struggle to read first the post’s title, because before reading me, you instinctively want to check what this post’s about, and check if it’s worthy of your time. But here, I have the power about such simple things, haha. And I love it! So, iPad 5. To begin with, I don’t necessarily give credit to these kind of “rumor posts” that begin the silly season every year talking first about an incoming iPad, and later in the summer about an incoming new iPhone. And its mini counterpart (talking about the second.) Today though, I found this picture rather interesting: it made total sense. Dropping the “new iPad” in Spring of 2012 made total sense; updating it just a mere 6 months later with twice the power (in both fronts: CPU and GPU) didn’t; it made Apple look as if they were the ultimate performance junkie, when Steve proudly believed that PC makers trying to shoe their way into “mobile devices” were talking about speeds and feeds, which was the wrong way to get about these kinds of computers. (Yes, they are computers.) By the way, nothing to do with the fact Apple has been stumbling quite badly with Wall Street investors in recent months. Continuing my derailment. Up until the iPhone 4, Apple released phones at WWDC. 2011 changed that with the 4S, but I suspected we’d see a new iPad come Spring 2012, and so we did. A new iPad, built on the same body as its predecessor and the venerable iPad 2, released months later didn’t make any sense at first, but then it did. So rather than a big mistake, it was actually a correction: the iPad 3 was the mistake being too early (too underpowered) at the party, but then Apple wanted to showcase their mobile business came before their Mac business, and so, the “Retina” moniker had to fall upon their full line of iDevices before it did to their premium line of Mac portables, because make no mistake, the classic MacBook Pros are going to die; I expect the “Air” to become just “MacBook” and the “Retina” models to drop the “Retina”. So sad there won’t be a 17” Retina MBP. The consequences? Despite the rumor mill, I do not expect either a new iPhone nor a new iPad until the Autumn, where both lines were updated last year. Rumours pointed at a 128GB iPad; I never believed it’d happen so soon, but there you go: the 4th-gen iPad now comes in a 128 GB variant, and as of today, in fact. As for the new iPhone… could it switch gears and be announced at WWDC? I don’t discard it, though I don’t necessarily expect it. If it does, we’ll see the appropriate smoke, it’s like that these days. What I do expect is a little something called OS X 10.9, which, a year ago, was announced, to my shock, somewhere around this timeframe. So an announcement like that could hit us any day now, with 10.9’s release date & price being announced at WWDC, together with iOS 7. Boy I hope iOS 7 overhauls the damn Operating System for once and for all; it’s full of UI-convention rot dating back to the original “iPhone OS” release of the original iPhone sold in June 2007. So what’s in the cards for this new iPad? It finally marries together the design of both the iPhone, the iPad mini and the iPad itself. And by the looks of the picture, it seems its designed fell into our hands late last year, in the form of the cool new iPod Touch. For me, it means I finally have a good reason to shell out my money for the next iPad. Not that the Retina display wasn’t enough for me, given the ton of content I read with it and the importance I give to pixel density looking towards my eyes’ health, but it just didn’t feel right at the time. Then Apple came and threw the 3 out of its stores and supplanted it with an equally looking device although much stronger in every department, given its speed improvement permeates every experience with the device. Was it time then? No. Tempting, but no. It still keeps the 2nd-iteration design, and I knew a new design would come after the 3 (I didn’t entirely miss my mark; who expected two flagship iPads in a 6 month timespan!?), and this one does look the part of my iPad 2’s successor, the one I had to wait for outside of San Francisco’s Apple store a good 5 hours to get (I’ll keep a picture for another day. Promise!).But there’s one thing I do not buy: the iPad Mini “as”, the better product. It’s not. Here’s why: it’s the little brother.  From the moment I saw it through the livestreamed keynote I knew it would hook anyone who would make the mistake of laying their eyes upon it and holding one with their own hands, but I still kept repeating people the very same thing: if I had one, I’d know there’s a bigger one out there, and that wouldn’t satisfy me at all. Why? Because as it stands, the 9.7” iPad is just perfect for me. The only thing it doesn’t do well? Films, due to its 4:3 aspect ratio, but I’d rather have a 4:3 9.7” iPad than a 10.1” 16:9 (I flipped them to emphasize my point) Nexus 10, and I love the dual ARM Cortex A15 nature of the Samsung-built Google Nexus tablet, but widescreen isn’t for me in the tablet department. I can take it in a Nexus 7, but again, 7 inches is too small for me. The iPad 2 isn’t too heavy for me as some claim, it doesn’t tear its way into my flesh as some comments point out nor is it too big for me: I can carry it quite easily in my backpack, and I bought a case I can wear over my neck if I just want to walk with it as I did in Hong Kong. So what on Earth is the problem with it? I use it to read, I appreciate its size, and it even gets small in some circumstances, but it’s good enough for most situations, and it surprisingly saves me from taking my 5kg 17” MBP if I want to do some light-study sessions where all I need are PowerPoint presentations (no more printing tons & tons of PDFs!!!!) and it keeps me company after hour of reading in my couch. It’s just perfect!!! Now, I understand a smaller size has its advantages, but given what I do with it, for me, the big iPad is the winner. And the fact that the Mini is just a resized iPad 2 with an iPhone 5-esque body at the moment doesn’t make it better for me. It is a tablet I’d recommend though, make no mistake: I only recommend four tablets on the market, the Nexus’ and the iPads. The rest are plain rubbish from what I’ve seen, and I’m glad Google took matters on its own hands when it came to the horrible tablet experience marring the Android landscape. So. The 5th generation iPad. Let’s wait and see how it develops throughout the year, and hopefully, I might be able to claim one of those as mine. Unlike some other things I said I might claim, but we’ll get back to that later. Wait. I do that too much, don’t I?  Oh, my.
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iPad 5

The thing I like the most about tumblr, is the wicked ways in which it allows you to present your own posts. This one for example, allows me to start by calling you out to look at the picture first, then read. If I do it otherwise, you’ll struggle to read first the post’s title, because before reading me, you instinctively want to check what this post’s about, and check if it’s worthy of your time. But here, I have the power about such simple things, haha. And I love it!

So, iPad 5. To begin with, I don’t necessarily give credit to these kind of “rumor posts” that begin the silly season every year talking first about an incoming iPad, and later in the summer about an incoming new iPhone. And its mini counterpart (talking about the second.)

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A matter of opinion

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Welcome! Today we’re getting a good break from all the intense photography posts I’ve been putting you through lately, and instead, I’d like to cover something that has been going in my mind lately. I won’t be long, I promise ;)

By now you should be aware of a little event Facebook held last week, in which they announced, finally, their entry into what has been traditionally known as Google’s territory: search. However, this time, we’re not targeting a different flavour of the same kind of information (I’m looking at you, Bing), but a means to put together all of the information Facebook has been gathering about us day after day and month after month since we began using the service, and display it to us at our request.

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Small and Touchy

A “Revolution is in the air”. Yesterday, at IFA, Samsung marked the official start of a new breed of cameras, a breed threatening with putting each and every point-and-shoot in the market left old and dusty, and the reason is, Nikon’s been joined by another player in proposing a new frontier for digital cameras.

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I don’t get it

Focusing on what people take for granted and bringing up an old concept twisted to fit the world we live in now, currently, in 2012, is one of my favorite things to do with the site. Gladly, a small incident with the shots I took on Saturday prompted a new question in my head, to which I got very poor answers. Answers which don’t belong to this day & age.

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Simplicity paves the way

This is not the first, nor will it be the last time, we speak about the eternal battle between the choice of having more options, or having things done easily for you. It can be taken from here, placed in an incredible amount of contexts, and seen work under different perspectives. In the end, you choose a side depending on where your passions live in, because you might not take the same stance under every different kind of situation.

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Kickstarted

Back in my “good days”, when I used to produce a piece per day, or at least show up, I spoke about Kickstarter once, on the night (my late night, at least) of February the 20th. The subject at the time was Tim Schafer’s revolutionary idea of getting an entire new game funded via Kickstarter, the platform for the people, with the idea that if people liked what he had in mind, they’d pay for the game he wanted to make: a classic point-and-click adventure game. If he failed, well, he still had traditional distributors like EA and Activision Blizzard to fund his less risky ideas.

But far from being a failure, Tim’s Kickstarter project was an incredible success, netting Double Fine Productions a lot more money than they ever expected, and most importantly, paving the road for what has been a trend of successful Kickstarter projects based on a very similar idea: a good video, and getting a whole lot of money to turn a thought, into reality.

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Killing the Apple Messenger

I think we can all agree I’ve been delaying this for quite some time, and since today it has been all about being, er, “well played” by Eclipse (hey, there might be kids out there reading this), let’s go and shoot the guy in the middle. After all, he deserves it.

We first spoke about Apple’s new Messenger beta back in March, when I explained how I’d been using it since Mountain Lion was released. But since then, comments here & there have sprung up about the service, which frankly, isn’t what I would’ve expected from Apple in the first place.

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