Blindsided by Apple – followed by a poor response

Analyst Shaw Wu: RIM ‘Blindsided’ by Kindle Fire Pricing
[Via Daring Fireball]

What exactly has RIM actually been prepared for in the last five years? Remember this one, where they thought the iPhone was impossible after Steve Jobs unveiled it?

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Check out the older article from Electronista. All the big competitors, like RIM, Microsoft and toerhs, thought Apple was outright lying about the iPhone. They had all convinced themselves that a large touch screen was impossible without destroying battery life. So none of the thought very deeply about it.

That explains why Google seems to have added touch to its Android OS as an afterthought. They suffered from all three of Clarke’s Laws.

A hallmark of an adaptive, resilient company, one that can survive in the 21st century is to be able to recognize Clarke’s laws and utilize them. Obviously RIM could not and looks to fail.

iPhones, microscopes and medicine

This Awesome Accessory Turns an iPhone Into a Fully Functional Microscope
[Via Cult of Mac]

We’ve seen some truly great accessories for the iPhone this year and the SkyLight should should certainly be counted among them. The SkyLight is a sleek, easy to use adapter that can connect an iPhone to a microscope. In an effort to overcome the global shortage in trained healthcare workers, SkyLight’s creators hope to connect doctors and nurses to patients in developing nations and rural areas.

By holding an iPhone steady over the eyepiece where an image is formed, SkyLight makes it incredibly easy to take pictures and video through the microscope. Once recorded, the pictures and videos are then saved on the phone and can be emailed to doctors, shared on social media sites, or saved for later use. Another interesting idea is that with the use of FaceTime doctors can examine samples remotely and provide immediate feedback.
The SkyLight’s universal compatibility allows previously owned technology (microscopes) to be upgraded to the digital age with the use of readily available new technology (smartphones). Rather than spending funds on costly new microscopes, schools and medical teams will be able to use the SkyLight to adapt new technology to their needs.

While working on a low-cost microscope for developing countries, SkyLight’s inventor, Andy Miller, saw a need for a device that could help overcome a global shortage in trained healthcare workers. Hoping to revolutionize telemedicine by bringing together two previously disparate but widely available technologies, SkyLight plans to implement the new technology in developing areas of Africa as well as empower students in classrooms across the country who will find the SkyLight setup to be more intuitive than old fashioned microscopes.

If you’re interested in helping the cause, SkyLight is currently looking for backers on KickStarter and only need $5000 more to reach their production goal of $15000.

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This could have a huge impact on medical decisions made daily, especially in developing worlds. Using FaceTime,doctors could consult about what a medical slide revealed, then put the iPhone on the microscope to actually see the details of the slide.

Very smart idea and using a non-VC driven approach like Kickstarter to get it going. Nice.

Android might always be jerkier than iOS

Why Android Will Always Be Laggier Than iOS
[Via Cult of Mac]

One of the things that really stands out using an iPhone is just how smooth it feels compared to using Android. Where as Android is laggy, with a measurable interim between when you touch the screen and when the OS responds, iOS almost seems to anticipate what you want to do before your finger touches the display.

How has Apple managed this incredible feat? A better question might be: “How has Google managed to screw up Android’s multitouch so much?” According to Andrew Munn — a software engineering student and ex-Google intern — Android is so messed up that Google might never be able to match an iPhone or iPad’s performance. Ouch!

Before we begin, here’s some background. In the past, it has been said that Android’s UI is laggy compared to iOS because the UI elements weren’t hardware accelerated until Honeycomb. In other words, every time you swipe the screen on an Android phone, the CPU needs to draw every single pixel over again, and that’s not something CPUs are very good at.

That argument makes sense, except if it were true, Android would have stopped measurably lagging in touch responsiveness compared to iOS when Android 3.0 Honeycomb was released. Except guess what? Android devices are still laggy even after Honeycomb is installed on them.

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The problem arises from a fundamental choice the developers of Android made years before the idea of touch even occurred to them They developed the Android to be used with a keyboard or trackball, just as every other smartphone of the time did – no touch.

When using a keyboard or other input, normal priority for the keyboarding tasks could be used. We text so slow that other background processes could take place. No need to give input a higher priority.

But rendering touch well requires a lot of the device’s power, so Apple made sure that anytime you use touch, it gets the highest priority, stopping anything that might slow down the touch interface. As stated in the article:

In other words, every time you touch your finger to your iPhone’s display, the OS literally goes crazy: “Someone’s touching us! Someone’s touching us! Stop everything else you’re doing, someone’s touching us!”

So moving anything on an iPad gives it all the resources the iPad can provide, making sure the movements are smooth.

But Google did not do this because they had to rush their operating system out to compete with Apple. They apparently did not  – or could not – rewrite the system to give touch the highest priority. So now, it gets the same amount of attention from the device as any housekeeping or app driven process.

And it may well be too late to change this without every app already out there to be rendered obsolete.

This is an example of why the well-thought out reasoning of Apple results in a great user experience versus the jury rigged, rushed efforts of their competitors.

Hints of the Enabling Act

by Wolfgang Staudt

The National Defense Authorization Act is the Greatest Threat to Civil Liberties Americans Face
[Via American Times]

If Obama does one thing for the remainder of his presidency let it be a veto of the National Defense Authorization Act – a law recently passed by the Senate currently which would place domestic terror investigations and interrogations into the hands of the military and which would open the door for trial-free, indefinite detention of anyone, including American citizens, so long as the government calls them terrorists.

So much for innocent until proven guilty. So much for limited government. What Americans are now facing is quite literally the end of the line. We will either uphold the freedoms baked into our Constitutional Republic, or we will scrap the entire project in the name of security as we wage, endlessly, this futile, costly, and ultimately self-defeating War on Terror.

Over at Wired, Spencer Ackerman gives us the long and short of things:

There are still changes swirling around the Senate, but this looks like the basic shape of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Someone the government says is “a member of, or part of, al-Qaida or an associated force” can be held in military custody “without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” Those hostilities are currently scheduled toend the Wednesday after never. The move would shut down criminal trials for terror suspects.

But far more dramatically, the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”

An amendment that would limit military detentions to people captured overseas failed on Thursday afternoon. The Senate soundly defeated a measure to strip out all the detention provisions on Tuesday.

So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it’s pretty likely to pass.

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Senators from both parties want to give the Executive branch the supreme power to determine whether anyone anywhere, citizen or foreigner, can be incarcerated indefinitely without benefit of any constitutional protections. And the Executive can use its military power to accomplish this, even in the US.

So, it is possible that if this becomes law, a President could declare anyone protesting in the Occupy movement  terrorist and have the Army garb them for secret detainment. Or perhaps a President could declare that anyone protesting on behalf of the Tea Party is a terrorist and have them disappeared.

Or maybe just anyone who criticizes the President? We did it once before. Now the President could simply declare the a terrorist, secretly, and they could disappear into some foreign prison under military control.

How about a judge who brings a decision the Executive does not like? Simply declare him a terrorist in a secret meeting and make him disappear. No need to notify anyone.

How in the world can we have a government – from both parties – which wants to just hand over the Constitution to the Executive branch? We are not suffering nearly the existential threat to warrant this sort of concentration of power.

And this is not something the President is actually asking for. He has threatened a veto. It is the Legislative branch shirking its duty.

Will the next step simply be to let the Executive branch make all the laws it needs for the protection of the  Homeland? We know where that leads.

If all of this does not disappear in committee, we could be in for some very rough times ahead.