Grant Diggles

Why you should wait on buying the Apple iPad

// March 28th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Personal Views, Technology

The Apple iPad - Apple's first mystery product

I’d like to preface this blog post by saying that I love Apple products. Steve Jobs and Apple Inc. have been innovative and persistent in bringing a stable and dependable technology platform to millions. I own several Apple products myself and have enjoyed countless hours of trouble free, productive hours using their products. With that said… I’ve got some concerns with the upcoming iPad, here’s why:

Not a MacBook, not an iPhone

So what the hell is it? I could understand the validity of the iPad if it at least did some of the basic features of either the iPhone or the MacBook, but it doesn’t do either very well.  I remember watching Steve Job’s keynote on the iPad and I thought, “if he just made it smaller and more portable, it would be more useful because it would easier to take everywhere with me, oh wait, that’s an iPhone/iTouch” and “if it only came with a stand and maybe an external keyboard so it doesn’t have to be on my lap or laying face up on a table all the time, that would be more convenient, oh wait, that’s a Macbook”. It seems that the iPad is trapped in a “not-good-at-anything” vortex, where Apple decided to take all of their bad ideas and shove them into a glorified iTouch. You have to accessorize the crap out of it to get some conveniences of a laptop, and yet given its size, it will never be convenient to travel with or powerful enough to do much of anything, dooming it to be “that novelty thing” that doesn’t get out of the house much. Based on Apple’s website, here are some of the more notable (or not-so-notable) features of the iPad:

HARD DRIVE

The largest hard drive you can get with the iPad is a measley 64 GB’s of space. Apple specifically emphasizes iPad’s ability to offer a unique, touch based experience in sharing and viewing various types of media. At the largest 64 GB hard drive, you are quite limited in how many pictures you can even keep on the thing, let alone all of the hard drive space your music, applications, books, videos and other media will consume. Enter Apple’s wireless hard drive, Time Capsule. Tack on another $300 and stay within 100 feet of the hard drive and your problems are solved. Of course, now the iPad is more expensive than the MacBook… and significantly less powerful.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION: Offer a larger hard drive (which they will, but you’ll have to buy another iPad), throw in a complimentary first year .mac/.me account for the 10 GB of hosted hard drive space, offer a discount to purchase one of Apple’s Time Capsules.

WIFI and 3G

Obviously, your internet experience would be quite limited without connectivity to the World Wide Web. Apple gets it right here with the Wifi, and the 3G option is also useful for those of us on the go all the time. Unfortunately, we are forced to link arms (once again) with the infamous AT&T network. If paying AT&T the astronomical fees for the iPhone isn’t bad enough, you can also add another $30 a month for 3G on the iPad. There goes my kid’s college education…

POSSIBLE SOLUTION: Existing iPhone subscribers get a significant discount from AT&T for 3G service on the iPad. Kind of a “thank you” for overpaying them all these years. And no, I don’t consider $30/month a discount.

MULTITASKING

What multitasking? Yup, the iPad can only do one thing at a time. I love the AT&T/iPhone commercial where they bash the Google Droid for not being able to make an appointment in the calendar program while talking to someone on the phone at the same time. Very witty… you need 2 Droids to do what an iPhone can do by itself, get it?! But I can’t help but wonder how I am going to listen to music on my iPad while at the same, browse the internet, read a book or view my pictures. Guess I’ll just have to go buy 2 iPads (get it?!)!

What amazes me the most, is that my iPhone and my laptop can multitask just fine, Apple has the technology… but apparently Apple wants me to think that the iPad is a “magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price” (their words, not mine), but NOT allowing me some very basic functionalities. In Apple’s defense, it’s my understanding that you can now listen to music and use the iPad… so that’s good.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: Make the iPad multitask, obviously. Also, apologize to consumers for leaving this feature out in the first place as all it has accomplished is to strike fear in the hearts of Apple lovers everywhere that Apple’s innovative days are over. Seriously though, its like building a car and forgetting to put wheels on it, then expecting people to buy the car and then, later, be willing to buy another car (car 2.0) that finally comes with wheels.

CAMERA

Probably one of the biggest disappointments with the iPad is that it is not equipped with a camera. The ability to video chat on the iPad would’ve been one of the coolest features, allowing people to walk around video conferencing with others (instead of making phone call in some circumstances) like we’re all on Star Trek. So many uses… gone. But don’t worry, I’m sure Apple will be more than happy to put a camera on the next version of the iPad in order to sell up to consumers, forcing us to buy ANOTHER iPad from them even though we already own one (which Apple will expect all of us to do).

NO DATA PORTS

Okay, so let’s pretend that I just took this amazing video footage of my children and I really want to share this footage with a friend on my “magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price” (their words, not mine). Like many of us, we carry things around like FlipCams or some other sort of media capturing device that requires you to upload your media via USB or FireWire. Unfortunately, you’re outta luck with the iPad cause you can’t do any of that on the iPad itself. You have to accessorize the iPad with their “iPad Camera Connection Kit” and/or you have to have ANOTHER product that you can sync with the iPad (similar to the iPhone) to move media over to the iPad. For the cost of the iPad, is it too much to ask for even a single USB port? So far, this isn’t feeling very “magical and revolutionary”.

ACCESSORIES, ACCESSORIES, ACCESSORIES

Since the iPad does so few things so badly, Apple has been good enough to provide us, the consumers, with a disturbing amount of proprietary accessories for the iPad to bring it into the realm of a mildly viable piece of technology. It seems to me that Apple is doing with accessories, what Microsoft did with Operating System versions… confusing us. Here is a listing from their website, with prices:

iPad Keyboard Dock – $69
iPad Dock w/o keyboard – $29
iPad 10W USB Power Adapter – $29 (one is included in the box,. but this one has a longer cable)
iPad Dock Connecter to VGA Adapter – $29
iPad Case – $29
iPad Camera Connection Kit – $29

Now granted, this may not seem like a lot of accessories when you look at them listed out, but imagine carrying these things around with you. If you think your laptop case is bulky, what until you start lugging all of these things little gadgets around. “…I would love to pull those pictures off your camera Stan, but I forgot to bring my iPad Camera Connection Kit, did you happen to bring yours?”

For a company that has been leading the way in providing sleek, no hassle design to all of their products, the iPad is completely counter intuitive to Apple’s reputation with accessory offerings that you “have to have” to actually use the product. I thought accessories were discretionary income items…

THE NEXT GENERATION

I’m not talking about Star Trek here (even though I was earlier in my post), I’m talking about the “next” iPad release. I can’t help but compare Apple to other companies that use proprietary technology and sleazy marketing strategies to weasel every last penny out of the consumer, enter Sony Corporation. Apple WILL probably end up adding a camera to the iPad, they WILL offer bigger hard drives, they WILL probably include a data port, etc, etc. but Apple will offer SOME of these features in different versions of the iPad in the future. What does that mean to you and I? Open up your wallets folks, Steve Jobs just hasn’t made enough money.

If you can exercise any discipline here, I would wait on the iPad until several more versions come out. It seems that the iPad will have too many uses to really be considered a glorified iTouch, but is too limited to really be considered a trimmed down computer. That’s my 2 cents…

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How To Build A Great Website For Less Money

// March 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Business, Insights, Technology

The Cummings Group, Home Page Snapshot

Recently, we finished our website for The Cummings Group (VIEW IT HERE). My design ideas were clear and I knew what I wanted, but I just needed a very talented designer or design firm to bring my concepts to life. I began the process of gathering referrals from others that I trusted who I felt knew what was hip and current, and I decided on a boutique web design group in Portland, Oregon. I met with the owners, discussed my vision and we were off.

Now it should be said, I was prepared to spend a goodly amount of money to get my company website done. We were unrolling new products and I wanted to deliver a content rich site that bolstered a clean, uncomplicated design for potential clients. Although I was not necessarily interested in saving money for the build of my site, I did learn some very valuable lessons about how to build this site again and save a ton of money in the future. Let me fill you in on how I would’ve done things differently in building a great website for less money.

1. Hire A Talented Designer or Design Firm

Let’s face it, you get what you pay for. When it comes to the design of your site, this is the one place you don’t want to try to skimp or save. If you don’t have a designer in mind, I recommend looking for sites that you like, as typically you can find the logo of the design firm in the footer (bottom) of the page. If you already have a designer, then finding website examples you like will help explain to the designer what you’re looking for.

I know what you’re thinking, “How am I going to save money hiring a high end design firm to craft my site?”. That’s a great question… keep reading.

2. Content, content, content…

The biggest hold up to any great website is the content. What do you want to say? What pictures are going to be included? How will people navigate you site? These are all questions that are entirely dependent on your content. I believe that the content is the most difficult piece of the puzzle because it requires a clear, well thought out strategy that includes who your target audience is, what you want to say to that target audience and how you will use the content to accomplish your goals. The last thing you want to do is decide to create a website and then figure out what your content is going to be afterward. I guarantee that this approach will blow up your budget and possibly ruin relationships with your design firm.

Once you have your design firm create the wire-framing/design and you have your content ready for population…

3. Finish ONLY the basic framework and infrastructure of the site with your spendy design firm.

Once the initial home page and basic content framework (content) page are designed, stop paying your design firm! You pay them to design, not build out basic pages. By allowing design firms to stay in their area of expertise (designing), you avoid spending a boatload of money on basic content population at expensive design firm prices. Adding more pages and populating them with content is very simple and basic and can be done by an experienced web tech at a much cheaper price. I recommend finding those types of people at places like FREELANCER.COM . My personal Web Tech group is Consulnet, based in Pakistan (or some place like that). You can reach my contact person if you’d like, her name is Shamim Rajani and her email is: shamim.rajani@consulnet.net

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That’s basically it. Of course there are little nuances that go along with this process. If you find that you are still confused or need a little help, feel free to contact me. If you’re question is simple, I can fire back a quick answer. If its really in-depth, I recommend you check out our company site. For a small fee, we can help you with all of the details.

Hope this was helpful!!!

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Short video messaging arrives on iPhone

// September 23rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

I love Apple’s market slogan for iPhone applications, something along the lines of “there’s an app for everything”. As fascinating as it may be, I wonder sometimes if we’re going to start seeing too much of the world, or the world is going to start seeing too much of us. Sounds like Twitter video is just around the corner.

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Converting to MAC from PC – My experience

// September 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

My brother had recently been harassing me about making the switch from the PC world over to Mac. Well, I bit the bullet and have made the switch and here are my thoughts on the process. (I will continue to add to this as I gain experience):

COMPARISONS

OPERATING SYSTEM:

PC :: Windows Vista – Windows Vista is horrrrrrible. I was part of the original testing group before Vista originally came out, and if I wasn’t completely lost in the new layout of Vista, I was busy rebooting my computer from all of the freeze-ups.

There are also several different versions of Vista as well. I was stuck with buying an out-of-the-box Gateway that came with Vista Home installed on it. I then had to upgrade Vista Home to Vista Business in order to access some of the networking features needed to use it within the office intranet. After installing Vista Business, I connected the computer to a wireless usb adapter only to find out that I needed Vista Enterprise to access the specific wireless networking features needed to work in tandem with my firewall and server.

I would recommend that you stick with Windows XP, as that systems has been relatively reliable for me from the beginning. XP still crashes from time to time, but is something I’ve come to expect using Microsoft products.

MAC :: OS X – Mac did a great job creating an operating system that is sleek and efficient. The computer starts up quickly each time and rarely bogs down or crashes. A huge selling point to MAC OS X is that there is only one version of it. After years of being taken to the “cleaners” with high prices Microsoft products, I was shocked to find out that MACs operating system, Leopard, was only about $89! Their newest operating system, Snow Leopard, is only $29 (I would recommend NOT upgrading until you make sure that all of your current programs will work correctly with Snow Leopard ( i.e. Digidesign’s Pro Tools 8 currently does not)).

OS X is intuitive, but to a seasoned Windows XP user, I still had a difficult time getting used to it for awhile. In part, because some things were so simple to do that they couldn’t be that easy. For instance, if you want to uninstall a program you simple need to drag the application from your applications folder to the Trash. Easy.

SOFTWARE:

PC – From what I can tell, PCs still have the market on software applications. Although PC software doesn’t seem to be as intuitive, the market still hugely favors PC users and most developers will simply sell to the largest market. Also, for that same reason, the market is very competitive which keeps the price of most of the software pretty low, very easy to find and many options available.

MAC – Software exclusively designed for MAC runs like a dream. It follows in the same fashion as Apple’s internal developers in that it is sleek, efficient and extremely intuitive. Unfortunately, I have found that this type of software is typically expensive. A small price to pay however for excellence.

***Running Windows on a MAC*** – There are times that, in the business world, I run across tasks that can only be accomplished with PC software (i.e. medical billing). My personal recommendation is VMware Fusion. Its has proven to be extremely stable while running both Windows XP and MAC OS X together. Several of my employees are using both operating systems in tandem on a daily business using VMware. Its worth a look.