Colin Charles Agenda

New iMac’s have been announced by Apple. 21.5″ models cost RM400 more. 27″ models cost RM500 more. These are the base models suggested retail prices. In the Singapore and the USA, prices have remained the same.

Apple has revised prices in Malaysia due to the weakening Ringgit. That’s about a 10% increase Malaysians are paying for new iMac’s. This will probably be reflected for iPhone prices as well. And if things don’t improve, iTunes content.

10.8.5 has been largely a disaster in terms of usability.

The FaceTime camera basically doesn’t work with apps that aren’t Apple-released on my MacBook Air. This means Google Hangouts, Skype video, all don’t work. Grr.

iTunes (11.1) podcast library scans like crazy, and the performance is terribly slow. I can’t delete iTunes podcasts, because everytime it tries to connect to the Internet and show me what else is there. Guess what? It seems that when I’m offline, iTunes just works. Annoying because I can’t listen to podcasts with ease now.

I updated my iPhone 4 to iOS7. It seems to just work, its slow as always, but I’m noticing apps crash, the camera can cause the phone to reboot. My father updated it automatically (without a backup) because he just said “yes”. It kind of bricked his phone when he couldn’t remember his iCloud password. Rather annoying. 

I think its great that updates can happen “over-the-air” since some iOS releases ago. But I should also be able to disable this, because I don’t want to remotely debug an issue. Try telling a businessman he can’t use his phone for half an hour?

What is kinda cool? FaceTime audio. This has huge potential.

In other news, I broke the up arrow key on my MacBook Air. This machine is about 6 months old. Replaced at the Apple Store, the Genius sorted it out within a minute. I’ve been using Mac laptops since about 2002 and this is the first time a key has broken. Designed in California, Made in China.

On 19 April 2010, I did some quick research to see which Linode host was right for you, if you were serving mostly Malaysian clients. I did traceroutes and looked at the output of curl. Linode provides speedtest files for you (they’re 100MB in size). I tested it against Streamyx 512kbps and 4mbps accounts (something that I can say was popular in Malaysia back in 2010). I intend to repeat this test again soon, but I have no longer got any Streamyx accounts available, so I expect all this should be much faster.

From the table above, you want the highest average download speed, with the lowest time spent. Upon multiple tests, on a 512kbps link, London was the quickest in terms of delivery (it also only took 8 hops to reach). However on the 4mbps link, its clear that Fremont is the best, even though it took 9 hops to reach.

Conclusion for me back then was that Fremont is a clear winner so choose a server based in Fremont. Tokyo didn’t exist before. Go on, host at Linode, they’re a great VPS provider.

About five years ago, I worked on kiosk software. This seemed like the logical thing to do after working on Linux LiveCD’s. It was meant to be an information kiosk for tourists to use, and just short of building & deploying the thing in a production environment, the bid was lost (worst off kiosk, cost 4x more, but given to a bumi husband & wife team – the remnants of the produce can still be seen today).

A lot has changed in 5 years. Back then this was a Linux terminal with Firefox running the interface. It was locked down. This was long before I discovered WebConverger for kiosk software.

Today, iPad’s suffice as kiosks. Kids have iPad’s to appease them from the time they are young. The iPad replaced the TV. Babies get used to touch before they say their first words.

So an iPad interface to show off your hotel like at the Aloft Brussels Schumann? This is just brilliant. For the people that go to stay at Aloft’s (say the W isn’t available in that location), they are likely already used to using i-devices.

Interface matters and iOS is the benchmark. I’m not sure X Windows and a browser will suffice even though they are almost the same thing. I’m not even sure if future kiosks will have a physical keyboard (we planned on it, with a trackball). Now you touch, type using a virtual keyboard and don’t need a pointing device any longer except your finger.

I went to the European Parliament for a tour and they had these iPod Touch devices with NOUSGuide on them. NOUSGuide have some opensource software available if that matters. I really enjoyed touring and understanding more about the Parliament using the iPod Touch. Again, its the touch and the familiarity with iOS that matters. Back in the day you got audio guides that worked when you scanned a code, or entered a number – horrible interfaces but they worked. These i-devices however show you more, and you can interact with the media – its no longer just audio, but photos and videos.

Hotels offer business centres and while they are full-fledged PCs they usually run in kiosk mode. For a while, the InterContinental in Seoul offered loaner Samsung tablets (for obvious reasons). The Park Hyatt just across the road offers loaner iPad’s. Again, touch is taking over from being in a stodgy business centre.

Interesting trend to see Apple devices take over in all these markets. There is also a changing face in the way we interact with kiosk-like computing devices. The future is clearly looking very i-device based.

Today I killed Dropbox and Copy, then I killed Skype, turned the WiFi off, and my 13″ MacBook Air was getting about 6.5 hours worth of battery life. This is very close to the 7 hours that Apple claims will work (though they do say 7 hours of wireless usage). Chrome, Firefox had tabs running, I was working in Mail and Terminal a lot, as well as Keynote (with 15 apps running when i mac+tab)

So what’s missing is battery profiles.

When plugged in, CrashPlan, Dropbox, Copy, etc. run.

When on the battery, CrashPlan, Dropbox, Copy, Time Machine, etc. stop running.

When on the battery with no WiFi, maybe Evernote sync stops, Google Drive stops, etc.

This app should make sure its all configurable.

Why hasn’t this appeared yet?

Maybe OS X Mavericks will rock in this sense since the CPU usage is only for the current running app, not those background running apps.

I’m willing to bet this kind of app makes sense even on Linux and Windows. We’re using apps that increasingly sync to the network. Some are badly behaved.

Road warriors need better solutions. And I bet they’d pay for it.

I’ve been thinking about simplifying e-commerce checkouts in Malaysia.

At bare minimum you need:

• Name
• Email address
• Phone
• Street address
• Postcode

State can be derived from Postcode. Country can be set as default, with the option to change it to something else (so a pull-down).

I found MalaysiaPostcode as a useful database. It looks like scraped data from POS Malaysia Location Finder.